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MACAULAY'S 
LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON 



ftlacmillan's pockrt American anti English, Classics. 



A Series of English Texts, edited for use in Secondary Schools, 
with Critical Introductions, Notes, etc. 



IGmo. 



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Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley. 

Browning's Shorter Poems. 

Browning, Mrs., Poems (Selected). 

Burke's Speech on Conciliation. 

Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 

Byron's Shorter Poems. 

Carlyle's Essay on Burns. 

Chaucer's Prologue and Knight's Tale. 

Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner. 

Cooper's The Deerslayer. 

Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. 

De Quincey's Confessions of an 
English Opium-Eater. 

Dryden's Palamon and Arcite. 

Early American Orations, 1760-1824. 

Eliot's Silas Marner. 

Epoch-making Papers in U. S. History. 

Franklin's Autobiography. 

Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. 

Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales (Selec- 
tions from). 

Irving's Life of Goldsmith. 

Irving's The Alhambra. 

Irving's Sketch Book. 

Longfellow's Evangeline. 

Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal. 

Macaulay's Essay on Addison. 

Macaulay's Essay on Hastings. 

Macaulay's Essay on Lord Clive. 



Macaulay's Essay on Milton. 
Macaulay's Life of Samuel Johnson. 
Milton's Comus and Other Poems. 
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Mark Antony). 
Poe's Poems. 

Foe's Prose Tales (Selections from). 
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Scott's Ivanhoe. 
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Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. 
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Shelley and Keats: Poems. 
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Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book I. 
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OTHERS TO FOLLOW. 



MACAULAY'S 
LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON 



EDITED WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION 

BY 

WILLIAM SCHUYLER, A.M. 

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL OF THE ST. LOUIS HIGH SCHOOL 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1903 

All rights reserved 



THE LIBRARY OF 


CONGRESS. 


Two Copies Receiver 


SEP 9 1903 


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£&.q,'493 


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Copyright, 1903, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, electrotyped, and published September, 1903. 



J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

It has been my purpose to make this edition of 
Macaulay's Life of Samuel Johnson as interesting as 
possible to the class of pupils who will study it. The 
notes are unusually full of explanatory and illustra- 
tive matter. It is useless to expect secondary school 
pupils to pursue independent investigations, and, even 
if the desire were present, the necessary books are 
generally lacking. The only book of reference one 
can count on is Webster's International Dictionary, 
and there are no notes on points where the definitions 
of that work are acTequate. 

Next to the study of Macaulay, the study of John- 
son's remarkable life and commanding position in the 
history of English literature is of great importance. 
For this purpose, in addition to much matter in the 
notes taken from Johnson's Works and Boswell's Life, 
there has been added an appendix containing selec- 
tions from the more interesting parts of Macaulay's 
Essay on Croker's Boswell (1831) and Carlyle's Essay 



vi PREFATORY NOTE 

on BosiveWs Johnson (1832), together with an extract 
from Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in 
the Eighteenth Century. References are also made in 
the notes to some excellent historical novels, which 
may interest the pupils and bring them into closer 
contact with the men and times referred to. For fur- 
ther historical references, Green's Short History of the 
English People (Revised Edition) has been used, as it 
is generally accessible and is written in a most inter- 
esting style. 

The text followed is that of the Encyclopaedia Bri- 
tannica, edition of 1856. The proofs of the Life in 
this edition were corrected by Macaulay himself. The 
only changes made are the italicizing of the titles of 
poems, books, and periodicals (which is the custom in 
the later editions of the Encyclopaedia), the placing of 
a period after " Mrs," and the insertion in the dates 
of commas between the month and year. 

My thanks are due to Miss Jennie M. A. Jones and 
Mr. Philo M. Buck, teachers of English in the St. 
Louis High School, for many practical suggestions 
and valuable criticisms and for aid in revising the 
text and notes. 

St. Louis High School, 
May, 1903. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prefatory Note v 

Introduction : 

I. Life and Writings of Macaulay . ix 

II. Macaulay' s Works xxxviii 

III. Johnson's Principal Works .... xliii 

IV. Chronological Table of English History and 

Literature in Johnson's Time . . . xliv 
V. Bibliography: (1) Macaulay, (2) Johnson and 

his Period xlv 

VI. Note on Methods of Study xlvii 

Life of Samuel Johnson 1 

Notes 69 

Appendix A. — A Comparative Study of Johnson : 

I. Selections from Macaulay 's Essay on Crokefs 

Edition of BoswelV s Life of Johnson . . 125 
II. Selections from Carlyle's Essay on BoswelV s 

Johnson 152 

Appendix B. — Johnson as a Moralist . . . .189 

Index to Notes ........ 193 

vii 



INTRODUCTION 



I. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY 

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born at Roth- 
ley Temple, Leicestershire, on the 25th of October, 
1800. On his father's side, he came from a long line of 
Scotch Presbyterians, many of them ministers ; while 
his mother was of a good Quaker family. The moral 
character of his ancestral stock was thus of the high- 
est and strictest, though by no means of the broadest 
and most unprejudiced ; and this may account for 
many of the striking qualities of his work, brilliant 
and vivacious as it is in other respects. 

Zachary Macaulay, his father, was a stern, taciturn 
man, having little outward resemblance to his vivacious 
son, but endowed with the same tireless capacity for 
work, and the same marvellous memory. He had 
made a moderate fortune in Jamaica and Sierra 
Leone ; and, on his return to London in 1799, became 
one of the chief supporters of the Society for the 
Abolition of Slavery. As the editor of the abolitionist 
organ, he was closely associated with such men as Henry 



X INTRODUCTION 

Thornton, Thomas Babington, and William Wilberf orce. 
His wife was a pupil of the sisters of Hannah More ; and 
that " high priestess of the brotherhood " became very 
intimate with the family, exercising a great influence 
on "young Tom," whose brightness and loquacity 
made him her especial favorite. 

The Macaul ay family — three sons and live daughters 
— were brought up according to the sternest Scotch 
traditions, by an unbending father, who, on Sundays, 
read his children a long sermon in the afternoon and 
another in the evening. Yet parents and children 
were bound together by the closest ties of hearty 
affection and devoted love. And the life of this 
family circle was the eldest son, Thomas. 

He was an extraordinarily precocious child. " From 
the time that he was three years old, he read incessantly, 
for the most part lying on the rug before the fire with 
his book on the ground and a piece of bread and 
butter in his hand." As he grew older, he read aloud 
in the evening gatherings of the family from the class- 
ical novels, standard histories, and even heavy articles 
from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. When not 
reading, he poured forth an incessant flood of con- 
versation, lively argument, brilliant sallies of wit, 
extempore verse, and bad puns. It was of him that 
Sidney Smith afterwards said, that " he had lately had 
several brilliant flashes of silence." In all this can be 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xi 

seen the sources of his natural and original style. 
The multitude of books devoured furnished him with 
the inexhaustible store of facts and illustrations which 
make his writing so concrete and vital ; continuous 
reading aloud trained his ear to combinations of words 
with easy flow, whose meaning would be most readily 
grasped ; and his incessant chatter perfected that 
vivacity which carries his readers through the driest 
facts of history with the interest which accompanies 
the adventures of the heroes of fiction. 

His writing began almost as soon as his talking. 
When only eight years old he wrote a Universal 
History, and an argument to persuade the inhabitants 
of Travancore to embrace Christianity. The effect of 
Scott's metrical romances on the child was the com- 
mencement of an imitation entitled The Battle of Cheviot. 
This was abandoned in favor of an epic in Virgil's 
manner, Fingal, in XII Books, of which the first two 
books were completed, with parts of the others. At 
the same time he wrote many hymns which were pro- 
nounced by Hannah More as " quite extraordinary for 
such a baby." And all these childish performances, 
scrupulously correct in spelling, grammar, and punctua- 
tion, were dashed off at the highest rate of speed. 

The boy's memory was equally astonishing. Though 
reading with the greatest rapidity, seeming to take in 
a whole page at a glance, he not only remembered the 



xii INTRODUCTION 

substance, but, in many cases, the very words. The 
story is told that, when only eight years old, he ac- 
companied his father on an afternoon call. While the 
elders were talking he got hold of a copy of Scott's 
Lay of the Last Minstrel, which he had never seen be- 
fore, and devoured it with his usual voracity. On his 
return home he sat down by his mother's bed and 
recited the poem to- her as long as she would let 
him. This power of memory he scrupulously cul- 
tivated ; and in later years he wrote of a journey to 
Ireland: "As I could not read, I used an excellent 
substitute for reading, — I went through Paradise Lost 
in my head. I could still repeat half of it, and that 
the best half." One wonders when he found time to 
do his thinking. 

Such an "infant phenomenon" could easily have 
been spoiled. And it is to the wisdom and watchful 
care of his devoted mother that Macaulay grew up 
with a personal modesty as striking as his brilliancy. 
" You will believe," she writes, " that we never appear 
to regard anything he does as anything more than a 
school-boy's amusement." And in a letter written 
him in his thirteenth year she says : " I know you 
write with great ease yourself, and would rather write 
ten poems than prune one. All your pieces are much 
mended after a little reflection ; therefore, take your 
solitary walks and think over each separate thing. 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xill 

Spare no time or trouble, and render each piece as per- 
fect as you can, and then leave the event without one 
anxious thought." It was to such wise direction that 
Macaulay owed his strict literary conscience, which 
made him in later years write and rewrite everything 
he intended to be of permanent value. 

The first trial of Macaulay's life was at the age of 
twelve, when he was sent to an excellent small school 
near Cambridge. The poor boy suffered terribly from 
homesickness. His letters to his mother show this in 
the most pathetic way. One of them his biographer, 
Trevelyan, would not publish, because it was "too 
cruel." In others he writes : " The days are long, 
and I feel that I should be happy were it not that I 
want home. . . . Every night when I lie down I reflect 
that another day is cut off from the tiresome period 
of absence. . . . Everything brings home to my recol- 
lection. . . . Everything I read, or see, or hear brings 
it to my mind. You told me I should be happy when 
I once came here, but not an hour passes in which I 
do not shed tears at thinking of home. Every hope, 
however unlikely to be realized, affords me some small 1 
consolation." ' 

The school was an excellent one, and the master, 
Mr. Preston, a good scholar and a thorough instructor ; 
but Macaulay had never cared to play with other boys, 
and the regular lessons and hours of study interfered 



XIV INTRODUCTION 

with the unbridled reading which was his delight. 
However, Mr. Preston allowed his charge free run of 
a large library. " He lends me any books for which I 
ask him," the boy wrote his mother, " so that I am 
nearly as well off in this respect as at home; except 
for one thing which, though I believe it is useful, is 
not very pleasant. I can only ask for one book at a 
time, and cannot touch another till I have read it 
through." He was certainly not restricted in his 
choice of books, for before he was fifteen he recom- 
mended his mother to read Boccaccio — at least in 
Dryden's metrical version. Every moment, outside 
of his allotted tasks, was devoted to history, prose 
fiction, and poetry ; but he never appears to have been 
interested in any of the simple scientific questions or 
mathematical and mechanical problems which occupy 
the minds of so many bright boys. 

In 1818 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. 
The study then most esteemed in that university was 
mathematics ; and for this Macaulay, after a transient 
fancy for its rudiments, entertained an intense dislike. 
His marvellous memory was of little service here, and 
he hated above all things prolonged and concentrated 
thought, especially on abstract subjects. " Oh, for 
words to express my abomination of that science!" 
he wrote his mother ; " if a name sacred to the useful 
and embellished arts may be applied to the perception 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY XV 

and the recollection of certain properties in numbers 
and figures ! Oh, that I had to learn astrology, or 
demonology, or School Divinity ! . . . t Discipline ' of 
the mind ! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, 
annihilation ! But it must be. I feel myself becom- 
ing a personification of Algebra, a living trigonomet- 
rical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All my 
perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least 
going. . . . Farewell, then, Homer and Sophocles and 
Cicero ; . . . my classics must be Woodhouse, and my 
amusements summing an infinite series. . . . Fare- 
well ; and tell Selina and Jane to be thankful that it 
is not a necessary part of female education to get a 
headache daily without acquiring one practical truth 
or beautiful image in return. Again, and with affec- 
tionate love to my father, farewell wishes your most 
miserable and mathematical son." 

It would have been well for Macaulay had he driven 
himself to a thorough study of the higher mathemat- 
ics. This might have corrected his desultory habits 
of thought and his tendency to avoid deep questions, 
and have added to the admirable perspicuity of his 
style a precision and exactness which it often lacks. 
As it was, it interfered somewhat with his standing 
in the University, where at that time " a minimum of 
honors in mathematics was an indispensable condition 
for competing for the chancellor's medals — the test 



xvi INTRODUCTION ' 

of classical proficiency before the institution of the 
classical tripos. Macaulay failed even to obtain the 
lowest place among the Junior Optimes, and was, 
what is called in University parlance ' gulphed.' But 
he won the prize for Latin declamation, he twice 
gained the chancellor's medals for English verse; 
and, by winning the Craven Scholarship, he suffi- 
ciently proved his classical attainments." 1 

In the social life of Cambridge he was very promi- 
nent, and became a great favorite. " So long as a door 
was open, or a light was burning in any of the courts, 
Macaulay was always in a mood for conversation 
or companionship." He was one of the brightest 
talkers in the Union Debating Society, and as a re- 
sult of the never ending discussions he changed the 
Tory politics in which he had been brought up for 
those of the Whig party. This was a great blow to 
his devoted parents and the wayward youth had to 
answer their charge of being a " son of anarchy and 
confusion." Still, owing to his strong common sense, 
or perhaps to his disinclination to follow out an idea 
to its logical conclusion, he did not, though it was a 
time of intense political excitement, align himself with 
the Radicals; but "took his sides with the old and 
practical Whigs, who were well on their guard against 
* too much zeal,' but who saw their way to such re- 
1 J. Cotter Morison's Macaulay. 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xvii 

forms as could be realized in the conditions of the 
time." 

Macaulay took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 
1822, and about the same time he learned that his 
father's business was on the verge of dissolution. 
The good Zachary Macaulay in his devotion to the 
abolitionist cause had paid little attention to his own 
affairs, and his partner lacked ability. Then it was 
that the son showed the sterling qualities which char- 
acterised him. He received the news " with a ' frolic 
welcome ' of courage and devotion." " He was firmly 
prepared," he said, " to encounter the worst with forti- 
tude, and to do his utmost to retrieve it by exertion." 
He was as good as his word. By taking pupils he 
supported himself while he was working for a fellow- 
ship worth $1500 a year for seven years ; and became, 
as it were, a second father to his brothers and sisters. 
And this he did "with the sunniest radiance, as if 
not a care rankled in his heart." His favorite sister, 
Hannah, said, that "those who did not know him then 
never knew him in his most brilliant, witty, and fer- 
tile vein." And his nephew writes : " He quietly 
took up the burden which his father was unable to 
bear; and before many years had elapsed the fortunes 
of all for whose welfare he considered himself re- 
sponsible were abundantly secured. In the course of 
the efforts which he expended on the accomplishment 



XVlll INTRODUCTION 

of this result he unlearned the very notion of framing 
his method of life with a view to his own pleasure ; 
and such was his high and simple nature, that it may 
well be doubted whether it ever crossed his mind that 
to live wholly for others was a sacrifice at all." 

Stern old Zachary Macaulay had been unable to im- 
bue his brilliant son with his own gloomy religion. 
He had even driven him to such a point as to make 
him hate all theological speculation, and to deride 
such questions as " the necessity of human actions 
and the foundation of moral obligation." But cer- 
tainly, in the realm of practical moral conduct, 
Thomas Macaulay, whether from nature or from 
education, left nothing to be desired. 

The Fellowship was not gained till the third and 
last trial in 1824; but Macaulay had already begun 
to make somewhat of a literary reputation. He had 
won the Greaves historical prize : On the Conduct and 
Character of William the Third, — the hero of his His- 
tory. Some portions of it have been published and 
show that his famous style was quite natural and not 
an artificial production. Compare the following pas- 
sage with any of his later essays : — 

" Lewis XIV was not a great general. He was not 
a great legislator. But he was in one sense of the 
word a great king. He was perfect master of all the 
mysteries of the science of royalty — of the arts which 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xix 

at once extend power and conciliate popularity, which 
most advantageously display the merits and most 
dexterously conceal the deficiencies of a sovereign." 

But what was of more importance to his future 
career was the contribution of a number of poems, arti- 
cles, and tales to Knight' 's Quarterly Magazine. Of the 
poems, Naseby and Ivry still live and are as good as 
any of his later verse ; the stories, Fragments of a 
Roman Tale and Scenes from Athenian Revels, give 
evidence that he might have become a better historical 
novelist than any one since Walter Scott; and one 
paper, A Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley 
and Mr. John Milton, touching the Great Civil War, 
is a "beautiful piece of majestic English." It is pub- 
lished in the first volume of Macaulay's Miscellanies, 
and in refinement and nobility of diction is decidedly 
superior to the more flashy and oratorical style dis- 
played in his subsequent works. It was Macaulay's 
own favorite of his earlier pieces ; and many critics 
are of the opinion that his political life and parlia- 
mentary speeches had an unfavorable effect on the 
finer qualities of his style. 

Zachary Macaulay was by no means pleased with 
his son's literary efforts. The character of Knight's 
Quarterly seemed to his stern morality frivolous and 
even improper, and the son again had to defend him- 
self from the father's animadversions. These articles, 



XX INTRODUCTION 

however, brought Macaulay to the notice of Jeffrey, 
then editor of the Edinburgh Revieiv, who was looking 
about for some brilliant young writer to put new life 
into this periodical. The essay on Milton was the 
result, and on its publication in August, 1825, the 
author " awoke to find himself famous." It was dis- 
tinctly a new and original force in literature, and 
not only fixed Macaulay's position in the world of 
letters, but was the indirect means of launching him 
on the political career which later absorbed so much 
of his energies. Jeffrey wrote him : " The more I 
think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that 
style." The admiration of the editor was echoed by 
the whole English-speaking race, which had found a 
new author after its own heart ; one who was sure of 
himself, who was not bothered with dubious problems 
or intellectual abstractions, who knew his own mind 
and could speak it forth with absolute clearness 
so that all who ran might read; who wrote with a 
" splendor of imagery," a richness of comparison 
and illustration, and a vivacity that made one certain 
that he was reading good literature. And Macaulay 
was clever enough to see the secret of his popularity 
and continue it. As he wrote to Macvey Napier, a 
later editor of the Review: "Periodical works like 
ours, which unless they strike at the first reading are 
not likely to strike at all, whose whole life is a month 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xxi 

or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even 
viciously florid. Probably, in estimating the real 
value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, 
you and I should not materially differ. But it is not 
by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the 
angler is determined in his choice of bait." 

Milton was the first of about forty essays which 
Macaulay contributed to the Edinburgh Review at 
various times for the next twenty years. These are 
the works which gave him his widespread contem- 
porary popularity, and of all his writings are the 
most widely read to-day. It is said that the libraries 
of many of the English settlers in Australia contain, 
beside the Bible and Shakespeare, only Macaulay's 
Essays. To many people they are their sole source of 
historical knowledge, and they are undoubtedly the 
best introduction to historical study. 

Macaulay " did for the historical essay what Haydn 
did for the Sonata, and Watt for the steam engine : 
he found it rudimentary and unimportant, and left it 
complete and a thing of power. Before his time there 
was the ponderous history, — generally in quarto, — 
and there was the antiquarian dissertation. There 
was also the historical review, containing alternate 
pages of extract and comment — generally rather dull 
and gritty. But the historical essay as he conceived 
it, and with the prompt inspiration of a real discoverer 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

immediately put into practical shape, was as good 
as unknown before him. ... To take a bright period 
or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, 
to conceive it at once in article size, and then to fill in 
this limited canvas with sparkling anecdote, telling 
bits of color, and facts all fused together by a real 
genius for narrative, was the scene painting which 
Macaulay applied to history. . . . And to this day his 
Essays remain the best of their class not only in Eng- 
land but in Europe. Slight or even trivial in the 
field of historical erudition and critical inquiry, they 
are masterpieces if regarded in the light of great 
popular cartoons on subjects taken from modern his- 
tory. They are painted, indeed, with such freedom, 
vividness, and power, that they may be said to enjoy 
a sort of tacit monopoly of the periods and characters 
to which they refer, in the estimation of the general 
public. Any portion of English history which Ma- 
caulay has travelled over is found to be moulded into 
a form which the average Englishman at once enjoys 
and understands. He did, it has been truly said, in a 
small way, and in solid prose, the same thing for the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Shakespeare 
did in a poetical way for the fifteenth century. . . . 
He succeeded in achieving the object which he always 
professed to aim at — making history attractive and 
interesting — to a degree never attained before. This 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MAC AULA Y xxill 

is either a merit or a fault, according to the point of 
view from which we regard it ; but from every point 
of view, it was no common feat." 1 

Mendelssohn is the best introduction to classical 
music, but the more one knows of classical music the 
less he cares for Mendelssohn. And so it is with 
Macaulay's Essays as compared with the highest forms 
of literature. Notwithstanding the undoubted merits 
of the Essays and their permanent popularity, it is 
certain that when one has attuned his ear to the finest 
nuances of the most refined English prose, he tires of 
the snap of Macaulay's short sentences, and the too 
obvious antithetical balance of his ringing periods. 
The oratorical devices for hammering home an idea, 
which succeed when assisted by vocal melody and 
graceful gesture, become monotonous in cold type. 
Macaulay's avowed aim was to make his writing 
" read as if it had been spoken off." But he forgot 
that there are delicate qualities in the finest writ- 
ing which are above what is possible to the most ac- 
complished anecdotist and the most successful orator. 
Then, too, one who has accustomed himself to deep 
thought and careful discrimination, is liable to be 
offended by Macaulay's cocksure judgments, insuffi- 
cient generalizations, picturesque exaggerations, and 
unreasonable prejudices. "Taken all round, his in- 
1 J. Cotter Morison's Macaulay, pp. 68, 69. 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

sight into men's bosoms was not deep, and was de- 
cidedly limited. Complex and involved characters, 
in which the good and evil were interwoven in odd 
and original ways, in which vnlgar and obvious faults 
or vices concealed deeper and rarer qualities under- 
neath, were beyond his ken. In men like Eousseau, 
Byron, Boswell, even Walpole, he saw little more 
than all the world could see — those patent breaches 
of conventional decorum and morality which the most 
innocent young person could join him in condemning. 
But the great civic and military qualities — resolute 
courage, promptitude, self-command, and firmness of 
purpose — he could thoroughly understand and warmly 
admire." * There is no doubt that Macaulay was often 
prejudiced and gave his prejudices full vent in his 
writings, but it must also be said that for the most 
part, like Samuel Johnson, his prejudices were on the 
right side, — that of reasonable liberty and rational 
progress. 

There is a great difference between the first thirteen 
essays and those which appeared after his return from 
India in 1838. The former were often written in great 
haste in the intervals snatched from his parliamentary 
business, and were never intended for permanent pub- 
lication. In fact, Macaulay resisted their republica- 
tion as long as he could, and was only forced to it, in 
1 J. Cotter Morison's Macaulay. 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF 31 AC A UL AY xxv 

1843, by the appearance of several American editions 
which had an enormous sale in England as well as in 
the United States. In the authorized editions he 
made many changes, improved the style, and on the 
essays written after 1834, he bestowed as much care 
in composition as he put on his History. He wrote 
to Macvey Napier about his Essay on Bacon: "I 
never bestowed so much care on anything I have 
written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of 
the article which has not been repeatedly recast. I 
have no expectation that the popularity of the article 
will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have 
expended on it. But the trouble has been so great a 
pleasure that I have already been greatly overpaid. 
Pray look carefully to the printing." 

It may be interesting to have Macaulay's own judg- 
ment on these works, as given in his letters to 
Napier : " Very little, if any, of the effect of my most 
popular articles is produced either by minute research 
into rare books, or by allusions to mere topics of the 
day. ... I hope in a few weeks to send you a prodi- 
giously long article about Lord Bacon, which I think 
will be popular with the many, whatever the few who 
know something about the matter may think of it. . . . 
[Magazine articles] are not, I think, made for duration, 
— and few people read an article in a review twice. 
A bold, dashing scene-painting manner is that which 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

always succeeds best in periodical writing. ... I have 
done my best to ascertain what I can and what I can- 
not do. There are extensive classes of subjects which 
I think myself able to treat as few people can treat 
them. After this, you cannot suspect me of any 
affectation of modesty ; and you will therefore believe 
that I tell you what I sincerely think, when I say that 
I am not successful in analyzing the effect of works of 
genius. I have written several things on historical, 
political, and moral questions, of which, on the fullest 
reconsideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I 
should be willing to be estimated ; but I have never 
written a page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts, 
which I would not burn if I had the power. Hazlitt 
used to say of himself, 'I am nothing if not critical.' 
The case with me is directly the reverse. I have a 
strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagina- 
tion, but I have never habituated myself to dissect 
them. Perhaps I enjoy them the more keenly for that 
reason. Such books as Lessing's Laocoon, such pas- 
sages as the criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Jleister fill 
me with wonder and despair." 

Whatever may be their faults, their merits are such 
that the Essays of Macaulay will probably be read 
by thousands of people as long as an interest in 
English history and English literature exists. 

In 1826 Macaulay was admitted to the bar, and 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xxvil 

went several times on the northern circuit. But he 
was not fond of the practice of law. It required too 
much hard and continued application to delicate and 
difficult problems to suit his offhand methods of think- 
ing. So he obtained but few clients. But during this 
time he was busy with what was of far more impor- 
tance to his future career. His essays continued to 
appear in the Edinburgh Review, increasing the popu- 
larity gained by the Milton. Their strong Whig bias 
attracted the attention of the Ministry then in power, 
and in ISg&Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner 
of Bankruptcy. In 1829 Macaulay wrote two vig- 
orous articles attacking Mill's Essay on Government. 
These so impressed the Marquis of Lansdowne that, 
in 1830, he offered Macaulay, though an entire 
stranger, a seat in Parliament for the borough of 
Calne. 

Thus began his Parliamentary career which, with 
two intervals of about five years each, lasted nearly 
till the close of his life. He took his seat at the 
commencement of the memorable struggle for parlia- 
mentary reform which handed over the political power 
from the country gentry to the great middle class. 
In this he took a, prominent part and contributed 
greatly to the final victory. His very first speech on 
the Reform Bill put him in the front rank of parliamen- 
tary orators. The Speaker told him that " in all his 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

prolonged experience he had never seen the honse in 
such a state of excitement." " Whenever he rose to 
speak," said Gladstone, " it was a summons like a 
trumpet call to rill the benches." "It may well be 
questioned whether Macaulay was so well endowed for 
any career as that of a great orator. The rapidity of 
speech suited the impetuosity of his genius far better 
than the slow labor of composition. He has the true 
Demosthenic rush in which argument becomes incan- 
descent with passion. It is not going too far to say 
that he places the question on loftier grounds of state 
policy than any of his colleagues." His fourth speech 
on the Reform Bill called out in answer all the best 
orators of the Tory side, including Sir Robert Peel 
himself. Macaulay's oratorical power could receive 
no higher praise. 

For the next four years he lived under an incessant 
strain. Besides his parliamentary duties and official 
work, he became one of the lions of London society 
and " a constant guest at Holland House — the imperi- 
ous mistress of which [Lady Holland] scolded, 
flattered, and caressed him with a patronizing con- 
descension that would not have been to every person's 
taste." He was also intimate with the leading wits 
of the day, with whom he more than held his own. 
Still continuing to write for the Edinburgh Review, he 
filled his engagements " in hastily snatched moments of 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xxix 

leisure, saved with a miserly thrift from public and offi- 
cial work, by rising at five and writing till breakfast." 

And in all this he was still hampered by his pecuniary 
affairs, as his family was practically dependent on him. 
But his ingrained honesty never wavered. He voted 
for the bill abolishing his commissionership, although 
his Cambridge Fellowship was just expiring, and he was 
earning only about $1000 a year by his pen. In fact, 
at one time he was forced to sell the medals won at 
the University. However, he soon received another 
post on the Indian Board of Control, which placed him 
in comparative comfort. But this too was put in 
jeopardy by his high sense of honor and duty. The 
slavery bill brought in by the Government, though 
quite liberal, did not satisfy old Zachary Macaulay and 
other fanatical abolitionists. The son at once told 
his chiefs he could not go against his father, saying : 
I He has devoted his whole life to the question ; and I 
cannot grieve him by giving way, when he wishes me 
to stand firm." So he sent in his resignation, and, as 
an independent member, criticised the bill. But he 
expected no mercy. " I know that, if I were Minister," 
he wrote, " I would not allow such latitude to any man 
in office ; and so I told Lord Althorp." Macaulay's 
noble independence was appreciated. His resignation 
was refused, and he remained " as good friends with 
the Ministers as ever." 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

But his pecuniary embarrassments still pressed 
heavily upon him. In December, 1833, he accepted a 
position on the Supreme Council of India, which 
involved his absence from England for several years. 
He well knew that it was dangerous to his political 
career to exile himself at the present juncture, but the 
salary of nearly $50,000 a year could not be overlooked 
by a man in his position. His views are given in a 
letter to Lord Lansdowne : — 

" I feel that the sacrifice which I am about to make 
is great. But the motives which urge me to make it 
are quite irresistible. Every day that I live I become 
less and less desirous of great wealth. But every day 
makes me more sensible of the importance of a com- 
petence. Without a competence, it is not very easy 
for a public man to be honest : it is almost impossible 
for him to be thought so. I am so situated that I 
can subsist only in two ways : by being in office, and 
by my pen. Hitherto, literature has been merely my 
relaxation — the amusement of perhaps a month in 
the year. I have never considered it as the means of 
support. I have chosen my own topics, taken my own 
time, and dictated my own terms. The thought of 
becoming a bookseller's hack — of writing to relieve, 
not the fulness of the mind, bu J o the emptiness of the 
pocket ; of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion ; 
of filling sheets with trash merely that sheets may be 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY XXXI 

filled; of bearing from publishers and editors what 
Dryden bore from Tonson, and what, to my own knowl- 
edge, Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to 
me. Yet thus it must be, if I should quit office. Yet 
to hold office merely for the sake of emolument 
would be more horrible still. The situation in which 
I have been placed for some time back would have 
broken the spirit of many men. An opportunity has 
offered itself . It is in my power to make the last days 
of my father comfortable, to educate my brother, to 
provide for my sisters, to procure a competence for 
myself. I may hope, by the time I am thirty-nine or 
forty, to return to England with a fortune of thirty 
thousand pounds. To me that would be affluence. I 
never wished for more." 

During his voyage to India, on which he was accom- 
panied by his sister Hannah, he shut himself up from 
the rest of the passengers. Outside of his immediate 
family, though a general favorite and possessing many 
acquaintances, he formed no close connections. It is 
to be noted as a characteristic trait explaining many 
qualities of his writings that he never was in love. 
Books always were much more to him than men. He 
writes: "My power of finding amusement without 
companions was pretty well tried on my voyage. I 
read insatiably ; the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, 
Csesar's Commentaries, Bacon's De Augmentis, Dante, 



xxxil INTRODUCTION 

Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon's Rome, 
Mill's India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sis- 
mondi's History of France, and the seven thick folios 
of the Biographia Britannica.^ He had agreed to 
keep up his connection with the Edinburgh Review, 
stipulating, however, that his pay should be in books. 
While in India he lived in a very modest style, and 
continued his enormous reading, though he accom- 
plished an immense amount of other work. Besides 
his official duties as member of the Council, he gra- 
tuitously undertook the reorganization of the public 
instruction and the drawing up of a penal code. In 
both these tasks, he accomplished beneficial and last- 
ing results. Mr. Justice Stephen says : " The Indian 
Penal Code is to the English Criminal law what a 
manufactured article ready for use is to the materials 
out of which it is made. It is to the French Code 
Penal, and I may add the North German Code of 1871, 
what a finished picture is to a sketch. . . . Its practical 
success has been complete. The clearest proof of this 
is, that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which 
have had to be determined by the Courts, and that few 
and slight amendments have had to be made by the 
Legislature." In this work, Macaulay's unshakable 
honesty brought down upon him the opposition of 
many influential Anglo-Indians, who had profited by 
the old nnjust laws; and so bitter were the attacks 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAU LAY xxxni 

that for some time he did not dare to let his sister see 
the morning papers. And yet, "he vigorously advo- 
cated and supported the freedom of the Press at the 
very moment when it was attacking him with the most 
rancorous invective." 

In January, 1838, he set sail for England with the 
competence he had so much desired, to find that his 
father had died while he was on the ocean. His 
mother had passed away shortly after his great 
speeches in 1831. 

Soon after his return, he made a tour in Italy, where 
he finished the Lays of Ancient Rome, which he had 
begun in India. These were published in 1842. Crit- 
ics have denied them the merits of the highest poetry, 
either in thought or versification. But their unfad- 
ing popularity with several generations of healthy 
and hearty schoolboys shows that Macaulay when he 
wrote of "brave Horatius, who kept the bridge so 
well," had something vital to say and said it in a 
vital manner. Trevelyan writes: "Eighteen thou- 
sand of the Lays of Ancient Rome were sold in ten 
years, forty thousand in twenty years, and by June, 
1875, upwards of a hundred thousand copies had 
passed into the hands of readers." 

Macaulay on his return had intended to devote him- 
self to literature, and to write his History of England, 
which he had planned to extend from the accession of 



xxxiv INTRODUCTION 

James II. to the death of George IV. But the Whig 
ministry needed all the support they could get. He 
was returned to Parliament as member for Edinburgh 
in 1839, and soon after was made Secretary at War. 

In 1811 the ministry went out of office, and though 
Macaulay retained his seat for Edinburgh, and attended 
the sittings of Parliament, he gave himself more and 
more to literature. In 1844, with The Earl of Chatham, 
he closed the great series of essays for the Edinburgh 
Review, in order to devote himself to the History, 
which he intended to make the chief work of 'his life. 
In 1847 he lost his seat in Parliament. His narrow- 
minded Scotch constituents were unable to appreciate 
his lack of sectarianism shown by voting for the 
"Maynooth Grant" to support a Roman Catholic 
school in Ireland. Of this he wrote to his sister Han- 
nah — now Lady Trevelyan : " I hope that you will not be 
much vexed, for I am not vexed, but as cheerful as ever 
I was in my life. I have been completely beaten. . . . 
I will make no hasty resolutions ; but everything seems 
to indicate that I ought to take this opportunity of retir- 
ing from public life." After careful consideration, he 
refused election from another borough and bent all his 
energies to bringing out the first part of his History. 

The first two volumes of Macaulay's History of Eng- 
land appeared in November, 1848, and had an immedi- 
ate success unequalled by any serious work in the 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xxxv 

English language. The first edition of 3000 copies 
was sold out in ten days. In less than four months 
13,000 were disposed of. In America, 40,000 copies 
were sold almost immediately, and the Harpers wrote 
Macaulay that in all about 200,000 copies would be 
disposed of in six months. The next two volumes 
appeared in 1855 and had a still greater sale. The 
publishers were able to pay him in a few months 
$100,000 — " the greatest amount ever paid at one 
time for one edition of a book." The fifth volume 
which brought the History down to the death of Will- 
iam III. was published in 1860, after his death. 

There is no space here to discuss adequately the 
merits and defects of this monumental work. It is suf- 
ficient to say that its enormous popularity was due to 
Macaulay's plan of writing history. And he has given 
us a clear statement of that plan. It was that history 
should be a true novel, "interesting the affections, and 
presenting pictures to the imagination. ... It should 
invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings 
whom we are too much inclined to consider as personi- 
fied qualities in an allegory ; call up our ancestors be- 
fore us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, 
and garb ; show us over their houses, seat us at their 
tables, rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, explain 
the uses of their ponderous furniture." In a letter to 
Napier he wrote : " I have at last begun my historical 



XXXVI INTRODUCTION 

labors. The materials for an amusing narrative are 
immense. I shall not be satisfied unless I produce 
something which shall for a few days supersede the 
last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies." 
And no one understood his public better than Macaulay. 
His last years were darkened by disease and failing 
strength. The magnificent machine, worked for a full 
half century at its extreme capacity, at length broke 
down. In 1852 he had a severe attack of heart disease 
followed by asthma and fainting spells from which he 
never recovered. Yet, in spite of suffering and weak- 
ness, he still struggled on with his work. In the same 
year Edinburgh repented of its former treatment of 
him, and unasked returned him to Parliament. But 
though he managed to attend some of the sittings of 
Parliament, — when his presence was needed, — and 
made one or two speeches, the effort was too much for 
him, and he bent his failing powers to the furtherance 
of his History. " I should be glad to finish William 
before I go," he wrote. " But this is like the old ex- 
cuses that were made to Charon." Still he found time 
to write five biographies which he had agreed to do for 
the Encyclopaedia Britannica : Atterbury (1853), Bun- 
yan (1854), Goldsmith and Johnson (1856), and Will- 
iam Pitt (1859). These are undoubtedly his very best 
works, having all the merits and but few of the faults 
of his early essays. The biography of Pitt, the last 



LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MACAULAY xxxvil 

work published in his lifetime, " is, perhaps, the most 
perfect thing he has left. Nearly all the early faults 
of his rhetorical manner have disappeared; there is 
no eloquence, no declamation, but a lofty moral im- 
pressiveness which is very touching and noble." The 
Life of Johnson, though marred by some of Macaulay's 
characteristic prejudices and exaggerations, is only 
second to the Pitt. 

The shadows of approaching death were partly 
illumined by the honors which came too late for 
their full enjoyment. He was elected Lord Kector 
of Glasgow University, made a fellow of the Royal 
Society, elected a foreign member of the Institution 
of France, and of the academies of Utrecht, Munich, 
and Turin. He was made a Knight of the Prussian 
Order of Merit, Oxford gave him the honorary degree 
of Doctor of Laws, and, in 1857, the Queen made him 
a lord, with the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. 
He was the first literary man to receive the last-named 
honor in recognition of his literary work. But the 
year 1859 found his health failing very rapidly — this 
being hastened by his melancholy anticipations of his 
sister Hannah's impending departure for India with 
her husband. Yet he still kept up his cheerfulness, 
and, on October 25, 1859, he wrote : " My birthday 
— I am fifty-nine. Well, I have had a happy life. I 
do not know that any one whom I have seen close has 



xxxvm INTRODUCTION 

had a happier. Some things I regret; but who is 
better off ? " He died suddenly and peacefully at his 
sister's house, the evening of the 28th of December, 
1859. He is buried in the Poets' Corner in Westmin- 
ster Abbey. 



II. MACAULAY'S WORKS 
(1) POETRY 

Lines to the Memory of William Pitt, 1813. 

Pompeii : Prize poem winning the Chancellor's medal, Cam- 
bridge, 1819. 

A Radical War Song, 1820. 

Evening: Prize poem winning the Chancellor's medal, Cam- 
bridge, 1821. 

Ivry, 1824. 

The Battle of Moncontour, 1824. 

The Battle of Naseby, 1824. 

The Cavalier's March to London, 1824. 

(The last two are known as Songs of the Civil War.) 

Sermon in a Churchyard, 1825. 

Translation from A. V. Arnault, 1826. 

Dies Ira, 1826. 

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad, 1827. 

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge, 1827. 

Song : " Oh, stay, Madonna, stay ! " 1827. 

The Deliverance of Vienna (translated from Filicaja), 1828. 



MACAULAY'S WORKS xxxix 

The Armada, 1832. 

The Last Buccaneer, 1839. 

Horatius. 

The Battle of Lake Regillus. 

Virginia. 

The Prophecy of Capys. 

(The last four are known as The Lays of Ancient Borne. 
They were published in 1842.) 
Epitaph on a Jacobite, 1845. 
Lines Written on the Night of the Thirtieth of July, 1847. 

(At the close of his unsuccessful contest for Edinburgh.) 
Valentine : To the Hon. Mary C. Stanhope, 1851. 
Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St. 
Gall, 1856. 



(2) PROSE PAPERS PUBLISHED IN KNIGHT'S 
"QUARTERLY MAGAZINE" 

Fragments of a Roman Tale, June, 1823. 

On the Royal Society of Literature, June, 1823. 

Slavery in the West Indies, June, 1823. 

Scenes from the Athenian Revels, January, 1824. 

Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers: No. 1, Dante, 

January, 1824. 
Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers: No. 2, Petrarch, 

April, 1824. 
Some Account of the Great Lawsuit between the Parishes of St. 

Denis and St. George in the Water, April, 1824. 



xl INTRODUCTION 






A Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John 
Milton touching the Great Civil War, August, 1824. 

On the Athenian Orators, August, 1824. 

A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic, to be entitled 
"The Wellingtoniad," and to be published in 2824, 
November, 1824. 

On Mitford's History of Greece, November, 1824. 



(3) ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN THE "EDINBURGH 
REVIEW" 

Milton, August, 1825. 

The London University, January, 1826. 

The Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes, March, 1827. 

Machiavelli, March, 1827. 

The Present Administration, June, 1827. 

John Dryden, January, 1828. 

History, May, 1828. 

Hallam's Constitutional History, September, 1828. 

Mill's Essay on Government, March, 1829. 

The Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill, June, 1829. 

The Utilitarian Theory of Government, October, 1829. 

Southey's Colloquies on Society, January, 1830. 

Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems, April, 1830. 

Sadler's Law of Population, July, 1830. 

Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, December, 1830. 

Civil Disabilities of the Jews, January, 1831. 

Sadler's Refutation Refuted, January, 1831. 

Moore's Life of Lord Byron, June, 1831. 



MACAULAY'S WORKS xli 

Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, September, 1831. 

Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden, December, 1831. 

Burleigh and His Times, April, 1832. 

Mirabeau, July, 1832. 

Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in Spain, January, 1833. 

Horace Walpole, October, 1833. 

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, January, 1834. 

Sir James Mackintosh, July, 1835. 

Lord Bacon, July, 1837. 

Sir William Temple, October, 1838. 

Gladstone on Church and State, April, 1839. 

Lord Clive, January, 1840. 

Von Ranke's History of the Popes, October, 1840. 

Leigh Hunt's Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, January, 

1841. 
Lord Holland, July, 1841. 
Warren Hastings, October, 1841. 
Frederick the Great, April, 1842. 

Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, January, 1843. 
The Life and Writings of Addison, July, 1843. 
Barere's Memoirs, April, 1844. 
The Earl of Chatham, October, 1844. 



(4) BIOGRAPHIES PUBLISHED IN THE 
' ' ENCYCLOPAEDIA B RIT ANNIC A ' ' 

Francis Atterbury, December, 1853. 

John Bunyan, May, 1854. 

Oliver Goldsmith, February, 1856. 



xlii INTRODUCTION 

Samuel Johnson, December, 1856. 
William Pitt, January, 1859. 



(5) SPEECHES, CHIEFLY IN PARLIAMENT 

Jewish. Disabilities, April 5, 1830 ; April 17, 1833. 

Parliamentary Reform, March 2, 1831 ; July 5, 1831 ; Septem- 
ber 20, 1831 ; October 10, 1831 ; December 16, 1831 
February 28, 1832. 

Anatomy Bill, February 27, 1832. 

Repeal of the Union with Ireland, February 6, 1833. 

The Government of India, July 10, 1833. 

The Edinburgh Election of 1839, May 29, 1839. 

Confidence in the Ministry of Lord Melbourne, January 29, 1840. 

War with China, April 7, 1840. 

Copyright, February 5, 1841 ; April 6, 1842. 

The People's Charter, May 3, 1842. 

The Gates of Somnauth, March 9, 1843. 

The Treaty of Washington, March 21, 1843. 

The State of Ireland, February 19, 1844. 

Dissenters' Chapels Bill, June 16, 1844. 

Post Office Espionage, June 24, 1844. 

Opening Letters in the Post Office, July 2, 1844. 

Sugar Duties, February 26, 1845. 

Maynooth, April 14, 1845. 

Theological Tests in the Scotch Universities, July 9, 1845. 

Corn Laws, December 2, 1845. 

The Ten Hours' Bill, May 22, 1846. 

The Literature of Britain, November 4, 1846. 



JOHNSON'S WORKS xliii 

Education, April 19, 1847. 

Inaugural Speech at the University of Glasgow, March 21, 1849. 

On Retiring from Political Life, March 22, 1849. 

Reelection to Parliament, November 2, 1852. 

Exclusion of Judges from the House of Commons, June 1, 1853. 

(0) THE INDIAN PENAL CODE 

Introductory Report on the Indian Penal Code, October 14, 1837. 
Notes on the Penal Code. 

(7) THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

The History of England from the Accession of James the Second. 
Vols. I. and II., 1848 ; Vols. III. and IV., 1855 ; Vol. V., 
1860. 



III. JOHNSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS 

Irene, a Tragedy. Nearly completed in 1737. 

Contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine, begun in 1738. 

London, a Satire, 1738. 

Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput, 1740-1743. 

Life of Savage, 1744. 

Dictionary of the English Language, 1747-1755. 

The Vanity of Human Wishes, a Satire, 1749. 

The Rambler, 1750-1752. 

Papers in The Adventurer, 1752. 

Papers in the Literary Magazine, 1756-1757. 

The Idler, 1758-1760. 



xliv INTRODUCTION 

Kasselas, 1759. 

A Journey to the Hebrides, 1775. 
Taxation no Tyranny, 1775. 
Lives of the Poets, 1777-1781. 



IV. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ENGLISH 
HISTORY AND LITERATURE IN JOHN- 
SON'S TIME 






1701-1714. Queen Anne. 

1709. The Tatler. 

1711. The Spectator. 

1714-1727. George I. 

1715-1774. Louis XV., King of France. 

1715. First Jacobite Rising under "James III.," or "The Old 

Pretender." 
1715. Pope's Iliad. 
1723. Pope's Odyssey. 
1726. Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 
1727-1760. George II. 
1730. Thomson's Seasons. 
1732. Pope's Essay on Man. 

1740-1786. Frederick II., " the Great," King of Prussia. 
1740-1780. Maria Theresa, "The Empress Queen" of Austria 

and Hungary. 
1740-1748. War of the Austrian Succession. (In America called 

King George's War.) 
1740. Richardson's Pamela. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY xlv 

1742. Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 

1745-1746. Second Jacobite Rising under Charles Edward, 
" The Young Pretender." 

1748. Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe. 

1749. Fielding's Tom Jones. 
1751. Gray's Elegy. 

1754. Hume's History of England. 

1756. Burke's Sublime and Beautiful. 

1756-1763. Seven Years' War. (In America called the French 

and Indian War.) 
1759. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 
1760-1820. George III. 

1765. The Stamp Act. 

1766. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. 

1769. Letters of Junius. 

1770. Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 
1773. Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. 

1775. Battle of Lexington. Sheridan's Rivals. 

1776. Declaration of Independence. Gibbon's Decline and 
Fall of the Boman Empire. 

1777. Sheridan's School for Scandal. 
1783. Peace with America. 



V. BIBLIOGRAPHY 
(1) MACAULAY 



Adams, Charles : Life Sketches of Macaulay. 
Arnold, M. : Mixed Essays. 



xlvi INTRODUCTION 

Bagehot : Estimate of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen. 

Gladstone : Gleanings of Past Years. 

Jebb : Lecture on Macaulay. 

Jones, C. H. : Life of Lord Macaulay. 

Minto : Manual of English Prose Literature. 

Morison : Macaulay (English Men of Letters Series). 

Morley : English Literature in the Beign of Victoria, Ch. VII. 

Stephen : Hours in a Library, Third Series. 

Taine : English Literature, Bk. V., Ch. III. 

Trevelyan : Life and Letters of Macaulay. 2 Volumes. 

"Whipple : Essays and Beviews. 

(2) JOHNSON AND HIS PERIOD 

Boswell : Life of Johnson. (The best edition is that of G. 

Birkbeck Hill.) 
Carlyle : Essay on BoswelVs Life of Johnson. (Extracts are 

given in the Appendix.) 
D'Arblay, Mme. : Diary and Letters and Early Journals. 
Gosse : History of Eighteenth Century Literature. 
Grant: Johnson. (Great Writers Series.) 
Green : Short History of the English People. 
Hawkins: Life of Johnson. 

Hill, G. B. : Dr. Johnson, his Friends and his Critics. 
Lecky : History of England in the Eighteenth Century. 
Macaulay : Essays on Addison, Walpole, Earl of Chatham, 

Goldsmith, Madame d^Arblay, and Crokefs Boswell. 

(Extracts from the one last named are given in the 

Appendix.) 
Minto : Manual of English Prose Literature. 






NOTE ON METHODS OF STUDY xlvii 

Nichol: Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. 

Piozzi, Mrs.: Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. 

Scoone : Four Centuries of English Letters. (This contains in 

part the correspondence of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale.) 
Stephen : Johnson (English men of Letters Series) ; Hours in 

a Library ; History of English Thought in the Eighteenth 

Century. 
Thackeray : English Humorists and The Four Georges. 



VI. NOTE ON METHODS OF STUDY 

It is impossible to lay down any method of study for this 
work which would suit even the majority of teachers or classes. 
Every teacher of English who is worth anything will have his 
own method of imbuing his pupils with a knowledge and love 
of the master works of our literature. The main point is to 
make the study interesting. A dry method, though it may be 
scholarly and thorough, with secondary school pupils at least, 
often defeats its own end. It makes no lasting impression. All 
the average pupil acquires is an extreme dislike for our classic 
literature. I well remember with what diabolical glee I burnt 
my Virgil when its study was completed — that Virgil which, in 
after years, I read with intense delight. 

Macaulay's Life of Johnson is such a good narrative, so 
clearly and vivaciously told, that the pupils, if they are not at 
first bothered with technical points of style, will read it through 
with much pleasure. Those notes which give extracts from 
Boswell and other authorities on Johnson, and characteristic 



xlviii INTRODUCTION 

bits of Johnson's own writings, may be used to increase the 
interest. By no means should the pupils be required to learn 
them. Then some of the extracts from Macaulay's and Car- 
lyle's essays on Croker's Boswell given in the Appendix may be 
employed to heighten the interest and to lead the pupils from 
Macaulay's vivid but superficial picture to Carlyle's deeper and 
more sympathetic insight. Johnson's place in English literary] 
history may be studied by means of the admirable passage from 
Leslie Stephen in the Appendix, the notes which refer to con- 
temporary writers, and some of the extracts from Carlyle. The 
chronological table may also be found of value here. 

As for the study of Macaulay's style, much will depend upon 
the judgment of the teacher and the capacity of the class. A 
general criticism of his style is given in the biographical sketch 
of Macaulay in the Introduction. Every English teacher should 
be familiar with Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, 
and should give his pupils as much of this as he thinks they can 
acquire. Single paragraphs of the Life of Johnson may be 
selected for intensive study ; and much interest may be aroused 
by a comparative study of Macaulay's and Carlyle's method of 
treating the same subject. In this way dry technicalities may 
be made quite exciting. The pupils may also be required to 
imitate Macaulay's style in written reports of investigations 
suggested by the literary and historical references given in the 
notes. But, after all, everything depends on the teacher. He 
will be either a taskmaster or an inspiration. 



MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON 
SAMUEL JOHNSON 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 



(Encyclopaedia Britannica, December, 1856) 

Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English 
writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of 
Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that 
century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller 
of great note in the midland counties. Michael's 5 
abilities and attainments seem to have been consid- 
erable. He was so well acquainted with the contents 
of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the 
country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire 
thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between 10 
him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong reli- 
gious and political sympathy. He was a zealous 
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for 
municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in 
possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At 15 
his house, a house which is still pointed out to every 
traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 
18th of September, 1709. In the child the physical, 

B 1 



2 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards 
distinguished the man were plainly discernible ; great 
muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness 
and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with 
5 a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination ; a 
kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable 
temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrof- 
ulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medi- 
cine to remove. His parents were weak enough to 

10 believe that the royal touch was a specific for this 
malady. In his third year he was taken up to Lon- 
don, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by 
the court chaplains, and stroked and presented with 
a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest 

15 recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond 
stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was 
applied in vain. The boy's features, which were 
originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by 
his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He 

20 lost for a time the sight of one eye ; and he saw but 
very imperfectly with the other. But the force of his 
mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he 
was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapid- 
ity that at every school to which he was sent he was 

25 soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he 



> 
SAMUEL JOHNSON 3 

resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He 
learned much at this time, though his studies were 
without guidance and without plan. He ransacked 
his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, 
read what was interesting, and passed over what was 5 
dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or 
no useful knowledge in such a way : but much that 
was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. 
He read little Greek ; for his proficiency in that lan- 
guage was not such that he could take much pleasure 10 
in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. But 
he had left school a good Latinist, and he soon ac- 
quired, in the large and miscellaneous library of 
which he now had the command, an extensive know- 
ledge of Latin literature. That Augustan delicacy 15 
of taste, which is the boast of the great public schools 
of England, he never possessed. But he was early 
familiar with some classical writers, who were quite 
unknown to the best scholars in the sixth form at 
Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by the works of 20 
the great restorers of learning. Once, while search- 
ing for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of 
Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity, 
and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, 
the diction and versification of his own Latin compo- 25 



4 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

sitions show that he had paid at least as much atten- 
tion to modern copies from the antique as to the 
original models. 
£L> While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his 
5 family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael 
Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, 
and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His 
business declined : his debts increased : it was with 
difficulty that the daily expenses of his household 

io were defrayed. It was out of his power to support 
his son at' either university ° ; but a wealthy neighbour 
offered assistance ; and, in reliance on promises which 
proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered 
at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young 

15 scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, 
they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and 
eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive 
and curious information which he had picked up dur- 
ing many months of desultory, but not unprofitable 

20 study. On the first day of his residence he surprised 
his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the 
most learned among them declared, that he had never 
known a freshman of equal attainments. 

3 At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three 

25 years. He was poor, even to raggedness ; and his 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 5 

appearance excited a mirth and a pity, which were 
equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was 
driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the 
sneering looks which the members of that aristocrati- 
cal society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some chari- 5 
table person placed a new pair at his door; but he 
spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, 
not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opu- 
lent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty, 
could have treated the academical authorities with more 10 
gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to 
be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now 
adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, 
over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty 
linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed 15 
ascendency. In every mutiny against the discipline 
of the college he was the ringleader. Much was 
pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished 
by abilities and acquirements. He had early made 
himself known by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin 20 
verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not ex- 
actly Virgilian ;° but the translation found many ad- 
mirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself. 

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the 
ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of 25 



6 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Arts : but he was at the end of his resources. Those 
promises of support on which he had relied had not 
been kept. His family could do nothing for him. 
His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, 
5 yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731, 
he was under the necessity of quitting the university 
without a degree. . In the following winter his father 
died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that 
pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the 

io support of his widow. The property to which Samuel 
succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds. 

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was 
one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that 
struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated 

15 by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound 
mind. Before the young man left the university, his 
hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly 
cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochon- 
driac. He said long after that he had been mad all 

20 his life, or at least not perfectly sane ; and, in truth, 
eccentricities less strange than his have often been 
thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons, and 
for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, 
his niutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes 

25 terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 7 

table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and 
twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing- 
room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's 
Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion 
to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather 5 
than see the hateful place. He would set his heart 
on touching every post on the streets through which 
he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he 
would go back a hundred yards and repair the omis- 
sion. Under the influence of his disease, his senses 1° 
became morbidly torpid, and his imagination mor- 
bidly active. At one time he would stand poring on 
the town clock without being able to tell the hour. 
At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who 
was many miles off, calling him by his name. But 15 
this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took 
possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his 
views of human nature and of human destiny. Such 
wretchedness as he endured has driven many men 
to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he 20 
was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was 
sick of life ; but he was afraid of death ; and he shud- 
dered at every sight or sound which reminded him of 
the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little com- 
fort during his long and frequent fits of dejection ; 25 



8 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

for his religion partook of his own character. The 
light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a 
direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays 
had to struggle through a disturbing medium : they 
5 reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the 
thick gloo'm which had settled on his soul ; and, though 
they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too 
dim to cheer him.° 

L With such infirmities of body and of mind, this 

io celebrated man w r as left, at two-and-twenty, to fight 
his way through the world. He remained during 
about five years in the midland countries. At Lich- 
field, his birth-place and his early home, he had 
inherited some friends and acquired others. He was 

15 kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of 
noble family, who happened to be quartered there. 
Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical 
court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, 
learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself 

20 honour by patronising the young adventurer, whose 
repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid 
garb, moved many of the petty aristocracy of the 
neighbourhood to laughter or to disgust. At Lich- 
field, however, Johnson could find no way of earning 

25 a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 9 

in Leicestershire ; he resided as a humble companion 
in the house of a country gentleman ; but a life of 
dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. 
He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few 
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he 5 
printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and 
long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He 
then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription 
the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history 
of modern Latin verse ; but subscriptions did not 10 
come in ; and the volume never appeared. 

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, John- 
son fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. 
Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children as old as 
himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to 15 
be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch 
thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibit- 
ing provincial airs and graces which were not exactly 
those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, 
however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight 20 
was too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, 
and who had seldom or never been in the same room 
with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called 
her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished 
of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned can- 25 



10 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

not be doubted ; for she was as poor as himself. She 
accepted, with a readiness which did her little 
honour, the addresses of a suitor who might have been 
her son.° The marriage, however, in spite of occasional 
5 wranglings, proved happier than might have been 
expected. The lover continued to be under the 
illusions of the wedding-day till the lady died in her 
sixty-fourth year. On her monument he placed an 
inscription extolling the charms of her person 

io and of her manner ; and when, long after her decease, 
he had occasion to mention her, he exclaimed, with 
a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, " Pretty 
creature ! " 

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert 

15 himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done. 
He took a house in the neighbourhood of his native 
town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months 
passed away; and only three pupils came to his 
academy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and 

20 his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have 
resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted 
grandmother whom he called his Titty well qualified 
to make provision for the comfort of young gentlemen. 
David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used. 

25 many years later, to throw the best company oi 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 11 

London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the 
endearments of this extraordinary pair. 

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his 
age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a 
literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, 5 
three acts of the tragedy of Irene ° in manuscript, and 
two or three letters of introduction from his friend 
Walmesley. 

Never, since literature became a calling in England, 
had it been a less gainful calling than at the time 10 
when Johnson took up his residence in London. In 
the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit 
was sure to be munificently rewarded by the govern- 
ment. The least that he could expect was a pension 
or a sinecure place ; and, if he showed any aptitude 15 
€or politics, he might hope to be a member of parlia- 
ment, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a 
..secretary of state. -Jt would be easy, on the other 
hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth 
century of whom the least successful has received 20 
forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But 
Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary 
part of the dreary interval which separated two ages 
)f prosperity.) Literature had ceased to nourish un- 
der the patronage of the great, and had not begun 25 



12 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

to flourish under the patronage of the public. One 
man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen 
what was then considered as a handsome fortune, and 
lived on a footing of equality with nobles and minis- 
5 ters of state. But this was a solitary exception. 
Even an author whose reputation was established, and 
whose works were popular, such an author as Thom- 
son, whose Seasons were in every library, such an 
author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater 

io run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was 
sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, 
the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, 
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, 
on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, there- 

15 fore, to imagine what humiliations and privations 
must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a 
name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson 
applied for employment measured with a scornful eye 
that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, 

20 " You had better get a porter's knot, and carry 

trunks." Nor was the advice bad, for a porter was 

likely to be as plentifully fed and as comfortably lodged, 

as a poet. 

// Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson 

25 was able to form any literary connection from which 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 13 

he could expect more than bread for the day which was 
passing over him. He never forgot the generosity 
with which Hervey, who was now residing in London, 
relieved his wants during this time of trial. " Harry 
Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later, 5 
" was a vicious man ; but he was very kind to me. If 
you call a dog Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's 
table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts which were 
made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he 
dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny 10 
worth of meat, and a pennyworth of bread, at an 
alehouse near Drury Lane.* 

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he 
endured at this time was discernible to the last in his 
temper and his deportment. His manners had never 15 
been courtly. They now became almost savage. 
/Being frequently under the necessity of wearing 
shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed 
sloven. Being often very hungry when he sate down 
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with 20 
ravenous greediness. ) Even to the end of his life, and 
even at the tables of the great, the sight of food 
affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. 
His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordi- 
naries and Alamode beef shops, was far from delicate. 25 



14 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a 
hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made 
with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such vio- 
lence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke 
5 out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty 
emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to 
him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, 
but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the 
insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardon- 

10 able, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him 
into societies where he was treated with courtesy and 
kindness. He was repeatedly provoked into striking 
those who had taken liberties with him. All the suf- 
ferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from 

15 talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the 
most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who pro- 
claimed everywhere that he had been knocked down 
by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the 
Harleian Library. 

24 About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in 
London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular 
employment from Cave, an enterprising' and intelli- 
gent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the 
Gentleman's Magazine. That journal, just entering 

»j on the ninth Jt%x %i its ltn$ existence, was the only 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 15 

periodical work in the kingdom which then had what 
would now be called a large circulation. It was, in- 
deed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. 
It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish 
an account of the proceedings of either House without 5 
some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain 
his readers with what he called Reports of the De- 
bates of the Senate of Lilliput. France was Ble- 
fuscu : London was Mildendo : pounds were sprugs : 
the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac Secretary of ** 
State : Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad ; and 
William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write the 
speeches was, during several years, the business of 
Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes, 
meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said; ij 
but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence 
both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was 
himself a Tory, not from rational conviction — for his 
serious opinion was that one form of government was 
just as good or as bad as another — but from mere •# 
passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the 
Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus against 
the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so much 
talk about the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers 
of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan 29 



16 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

when he could scarcely speak. Before he was three 
he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverell 
preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the 
sermon with as much respect, and probably with as 
5 much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the 
congregation. The work which had been begun in 
the nursery had been completed by the university. 
Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most 
Jacobitical place in England ; and Pembroke was one 

io of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The 
prejudices which he brought up to London were 
scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tem- 
pest. Charles II. and James IL° were two of the 
best kings that ever reigned. Laud,° a poor creature 

15 who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating 
more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, 
was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb 
Art and Genius still continued to weep. Hampden 
deserved no more honourable name than that of "the 

20 zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, con- 
demned not less decidedly by Falkland and Claren- 
don than by the bitterest Eoundheads, Johnson 
would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional 
impost. Under a government, the mildest that had 

25 ever been known in the world, under a government 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 17 

which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty 
of speech and action, he fancied that he was a slave ; 
he assailed the ministry with dbloquy which refuted 
itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness 
of those golden clays in which a writer who had taken 5 
but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him would 
have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped 
at the cart's tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to 
die. He hated dissenters and stockjobbers, the ex- 
cise and the army, septennial parliaments, and conti- 10 
nental connections. He long had an aversion to the 
Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember 
the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably 
originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the 
nation during the Great Kebellion. It is easy to 15 
guess in what manner debates on great party ques- 
tions were likely to be reported by a man whose judg- 
ment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show 
of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of 
the Magazine. But Johnson long afterwards owned 20 
that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken 
care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of 
it ; and, in fact, every passage which has lived, every 
passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties, 
is put into the mouth of some member of the opposition. 25 



18 SAMUEL JOHNSON 



if 



A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these 
obscure labours, he published a work which at once 
placed him high among the writers of his age. It is 
probable that what he had suffered during his first 
5 year in London had often reminded him of some parts 
of that noble poem in which Juvenal had described 
the misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, 
lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering 
garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's 

io admirable -imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles 
had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were 
by many readers thought superior to the originals. 
What Pope had done for Horace, Johnson aspired to 
do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold, and yet 

15 judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there 
was much in common, much more certainly than be- 
tween Pope and Horace. 

Johnson's London appeared without his name in 
May, 1738. He received only ten guineas for this 

20 stately and vigorous poem : but the sale was rapid, 
and the success complete. A second edition was, 
required within a week. Those small critics who are 
always desirous to lower established reputations ran 
about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was 

25 superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 19 

literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honour 
of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause with 
which the appearance of a rival genius was welcomed. 
He made inquiries about the author of London. Such 
a man, he said, could not long be concealed. The 5 
name was soon discovered ; and Pope, with great kind- 
ness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree 
and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor 
young poet. The attempt failed ; and Johnson re- 
mained a bookseller's hack. 10 
, It does not appear that these two men, the most 
eminent writer of the generation which was going out, 
and the most eminent writer of the generation which 
was coming in, ever saw each other. They lived in 
very different circles, one surrounded by dukes and 15 
earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index 
makers. Among Johnson's associates at this time 
may be mentioned Boyse,° who, when his shirts were 
pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting up in bed with 
his arms through two holes in his blanket, who com- 20 
posed very respectable sacred poetry when he was 
sober, and who was at last run jover by a hackney 
coach when he was drunk; Hoole, surnamed the 
metaphysical tailor, who, instead of attending to his 
measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the 25 



20 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

board where he sate cross-legged ; and the penitent 
impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all 
day, in a humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish 
rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at 
5 night with literary and theological conversation at an 
alehouse in the city. But the most remarkable of the 
persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted 
was Eichard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's 
apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who 

10 had feasted among blue ribands in Saint James's 
Square, and had lain with fifty pounds' weight of 
iron on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. 
This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk 
at last into abject and hopeless poverty. His pen had 

15 failed him. His patrons had been taken away by 
death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with 
which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrate- 
ful insolence with which he rejected their advice. 
He now lived by begging. He dined on venison and 

20 champagne whenever he had been so fortunate as to 
borrow a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccess- 
ful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps 
of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the 
Piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and, in 

25 cold weather, as near as he could get to the furnace 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 21 

of a glass house. Yet, in his misery, he was still an 
agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store 
of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from 
which he was now an outcast. He had observed the 
great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxa- 5 
tion, had seen the leaders of opposition without the 
mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minister 
roar with laughter and tell stories not over decent. 
During some months Savage lived in the closest 
familiarity with Johnson ; and then the friends parted, 10 
not without tears. Johnson remained in London to 
drudge for Cave. Savage went to the West of Eng- 
land, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and, in 
1743, died, penniless and heart-broken, in Bristol 
gaol. 15 

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was 
strongly excited about his extraordinary character, 
and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of 
him appeared widely different from the catchpenny 
lives of eminent men which were then a staple article 20 
of manufacture in Grub Street. The style was indeed 
deficient in ease and variety ; and the writer was evi- 
dently too partial to the Latin element of our lan- 
guage. But the little work, with all its faults, was a 
masterpiece. No finer specimen of literary biography 25 



22 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

existed in any language, living or dead; and a dis- 
cerning critic might have confidently predicted that 
the author was destined to be the founder of a new 
school of English eloquence. 
5 The Life of Savage was anonymous ; but it was well 
known in literary circles that Johnson was the writer. 
During the three years which followed, he produced 
no important work ; but he was not, and indeed could 
not be, idle. The fame of his abilities and learning 

10 continued to grow. Warburton pronounced him a 
man of parts and genius ; and the praise of Warburton 
was then no light thing. Such was Johnson's repu- 
tation that, in 1747, several eminent booksellers com- 
bined to employ him in the arduous work of preparing 

15 a Dictionary of the English Language, in two folio 

volumes. The sum which they agreed to pay him 

was only fifteen hundred guineas ; and out of this 

sum he had to pay several poor men of letters who 

, assisted him in the humbler parts of his task. 

4o\ The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to 
y the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been 
celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the brill- 
iancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He 
was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the 

25 House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 23 

at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, 
wisdom, and humanity ; and he had since become Sec- 
retary of State. He received Johnson's homage with 
the most winning affability, and requited it with a 
few guineas, bestowed doubtless in a very graceful 5 
manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his 
carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups 
and wines thrown to right and left over the gowns of 
fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an 
absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and 10 
uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scarecrow, 
and ate like a cormorant. During some time John- 
son continued to call on his patron, but, after being 
repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship was 
not at home, took the hint, and ceased to present him- 15 
self at the inhospitable door.° 
<0 Johnson had flattered himself that he should 
have completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750 ; 
but it was not till 1755 that he at length gave his 
huge volumes to the world. During the seven years 20 
which he passed in the drudgery of penning defini- 
tions and marking quotations for transcription, he 
sought for relaxation in literary labour of a more 
agreeable kind. In 1749 he published the Vanity of 
Human Wishes, an excellent imitation of the Tenth 25 



24 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Satire of Juvenal. It is in truth not easy to say 
whether the palm belongs to the ancient or to the 
modern poet. The couplets in which the fall of AVol- 
sey° is described, though lofty and sonorous, are feeble 
5 when compared with the wonderful lines which bring 
before us all Eome in tumult on the day of the fall of 

. Sejanus, the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull 
stalking towards the Capitol, the statues rolling down 
from their pedestals, the flatterers of the disgraced 

io minister running to see him dragged with a hook 
through the streets, and to have a kick at his carcase 
before it is hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned 
too that in the concluding passage the Christian mor- 
alist has not made the most of his advantages, and 

15 has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of his 
Pagan model. On the other hand, Juvenal's Hanni- 
bal must yield to Johnson's Charles ; and Johnson's 
vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of 
a literary life must be allowed to be superior to Ju- 

20 venal' s lamentation over the fate of Demosthenes and 
Cicero. 
2- / For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes 
Johnson received only fifteen guineas. 

<X, A few days after the publication of this poem, his 

25 tragedy, begun many years before, was brought on 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 25 

the stage. His pupil, David GarricQ had, in 1741, 
made his appearance on a hnmble stage in Goodman's 
Fields, had at once risen to the first place among 
actors, and was now, after several years of almost un- 
interrupted success, manager of Drury Lane Theatre. 5 
The relation between him and his old preceptor was 
of a very singular Hand. They repelled each other 
strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. 
Nature had made them of very different clay; and 
circumstances had fully brought out the natural pe- 10 
culiarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned 
Garrick's head. Continued adversity had soured 
Johnson's temper. Johnson saw with more envy 
than became so great a man the villa, the plate, the 
china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic 15 
had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticula- 
tions, what wiser men had written; and the exqui- 
sitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the 
thought that, while all the rest of the world was 
applauding him, he could obtain from one morose 20 
cynic, whose opinion it was impossible to despise, 
scarcely any compliment not acidulated with scorn. 
Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recol- 
lections in common, and sympathised with each other 
on so many points on which they sympathised with 25 



26 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

nobody else in the vast population of the capital, that, 
though the master was often provoked by the monkey- 
like impertinence of the pupil, and the pupil by the 
bearish rudeness of the master, they remained friends 
5 till they were parted by death. Garrick now brought 
Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease the 
author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to 
the audience. The public, however, listened, with little 
emotion, but with much civility, to five acts of monot- 

io onous declamation. After nine representations the 
play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, altogether un- 
suited to the stage, and, even when perused in the 
closet, will be found hardly worthy of the author. 
He had not the slightest notion of what blank verse 

15 should be. A change in the last syllable of every 
other line would make the versification of the Vanity 
of Human Wishes closely resemble the versification of 
Irene. The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit 
nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his trag- 

20 edy, about three hundred pounds, then a great sum in 

his estimation. 9 

About a year after the representation of Irene, lit 

began to publish a series of short essays on morals, 

manners, and literature. This species of composition 

25 had been brought into fashion by the success of the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 27 

Tatter, and by the still more brilliant success of the 
Spectator. A crowd of small writers had vainly 
attempted to rival Addison. The Lay Monastery, the 
Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Cham- 
pion, and other works of the same kind, had had their 5 
short day. None of them had obtained a permanent 
place in our literature ; and they are now to be found 
only in the libraries of the curious. At length John- 
son undertook the adventure in which so many aspi- 
rants had failed. In the thirty-sixth year after the 10 
appearance of the last number of the Spectator ap- 
peared the first number of the Rambler. From March, 
17$®, to March, 1752, this paper continued to come out 
e^ery Tuesday and Saturday. 

/^Froni the first the Rambler was enthusiastically ad- 15 
mired by a few eminent men. Eichardson, when 
only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, 
ft not superior to the Spectator. Young and Hartley 
expressed their approbation not less warmly. Bubb 
Dodington, among whose many faults indifference to 20 
the claims of genius and learning cannot be reckoned, 
solicited the acquaintance of the writer. In conse- 
quence probably of the good offices of Dodington, who 
was then the confidential adviser of Prince Frederic, 
two of His Eoyal Highness's gentlemen carried a 25 



28 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

gracious message to the printing office, and ordered 
seven copies for Leicester House. But these over- 
tures seem to have been very coldly received. John- 
son had had enough of the patronage of the great to 
5 last him all his life, and was not disposed to haunt 
any other door as he had haunted the door of 
Chesterfield. . - 

By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly 
received. Though the price of a number was only two- 

10 pence, the sale did not amount to five hundred. The 
profits were therefore very small. But as soon as the 
flying leaves were collected and reprinted they became 
popular. The author lived to see thirteen thousand 
copies spread over England alone. Separate editions 

15 were published for the Scotch and Irish markets. A 
large party pronounced the style perfect r so absolutely 
perfect that in some essays it would be impossible for 
the writer himself to alter a single word for the better. 
Another party, not less numerous, vehemently accused 

20 him of having corrupted the purity of the English 
tongue. The best critics admitted that his diction 
was too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and nrw 
and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did jus- 
tice to the acuteness of his observations on morals 

25 and manners, to the constant precision and frequent 



SAMUMt JOHNSON 29 

brilliancy of his language, to the weighty and mag- 
nificent eloquence of many serious passages, and 
to the solemn yeCpleasing humour of some of the 
lighter papers. On the question of precedence between 
Addison and Johnson, a question which, seventy years 5 
ago, was much disputed, posterity has pronounced a 
decision from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, 
his chaplain and his butler, Will Wimble and Will 
Honeycomb, the Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the 
Retired Citizen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow 10 
Flitch, the Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit t» 
the Exchange, and the Visit to the Abbey, are known 
to everybody. But many men and women, even of 
highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted with Squire 
Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Venustulus, 15 
the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the Chronicle of the 
Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate of Aningait 
and A jut-, 

J The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy 
hour. Mrs. Johnson had been given over by the 20 
physicians. Three days later she died. She left her 
husband almost broken-hearted. Many people had 
been surprised to see a man of his genius and learn- 
ing stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself 
almost every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a 25 



30 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

silly, affected old woman with superfluities, which 
she accepted with but little gratitude. But all his 
affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither 
brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To him 
5 she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady 
Mary.° Her opinion of his writings was more impor- 
tant to him than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane 
Theatre, or the judgment of the Monthly Review. The 
chief support which had sustained him through the 

io most arduous labour of his life was the hope that she 
would enjoy the fame and the profit which he antici- 
pated from his Dictionary. She was gone ; and in that 
vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by eight hundred 
thousand human beings, he was alone. Yet it was 

15 necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, 
doggedly to work. After three more laborious years, 
the Dictionary was at length complete. 

It had been generally supposed that this great work 
would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished 

20 nobleman to whom the prospectus had been addressed. 
He well knew the value of such a compliment; and 
therefore, when the day of publication drew near, he 
exerted himself to soothe, by a show of zealous and at. 
the same time of delicate and judicious kindness, the 

25 pride which he had so cruelly wounded. Since the* 



* 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 31 

Ramblers had ceased to appear, the town had been 
entertained by a journal called The World, to which 
many men of high rank and fashion contributed. In 
two successive numbers of The World, the Dictionary 
was, to use the modern phrase, puffed with wonderful 5 
skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. 
It was proposed that he should be invested with the 
authority of a Dictator, nay, of a Pope, over our lan- 
guage, and that his decisions about the meaning and 
the spelling of words should be received as final. His 10 
two folios, it wasv r said, would of course be bought by 
everybody who could afford to buy them. It was soon 
known that these papers were written by Chesterfield. 
But the just resentment of Johnson was not to be so 
appeased. In a letter written with singular energy 15 
and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the 
tardy advances of his patron. The Dictionary came 
forth without a dedication. In the preface the author 
truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and 
described the difficulties with which he had been left 20 
to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest 
and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, 
Home Tooke,° never could read that passage without 
ears. 



,VThe public, on this occasion, did Johnson full jus- 25 
1 .W 



\ 



32 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

tice, and something more than justice. The best 
lexicographer may well be content if his productions 
are received by the world with cold esteem. But 
Johuson's Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm 

5 such as no similar work has ever excited. It was 
indeed the first dictionary which could be read with 
pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of 
thought and command of language, and the passages 
quoted from poets, divines, and philosophers are so 

io skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be 
very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The 
faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most 
part, into one great fault. Johnson was a. wretched 
etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teu- 

15 tonic language except English, which indeed, as he 
wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language ; and thus 
he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skinner. 
I The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, 
added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen 

20 hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to 
pay him had been advanced and spent before the last 
sheets issued from the press. It is painful to relate 
that, twice in the course of the year which followed 
the publication of this great work, he was arrestee^ 

25 and carried to spunging-houses, and that he was twicl 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 33 

indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Richard- 
son. It was still necessary for the man who had been 
formally sainted by the highest authority as Dictator 
of the English language to supply his wants by con- 
stant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He proposed 5 
to bring out an edition of Shakspeare by subscription ; 
and many subscribers sent in their names and laid 
down their money ; but he soon found the task so 
little to his taste that he turned to more attractive 
employments. He contributed many papers to a new 10 
monthly journal, which was called the Literary Maga- 
zine. Few of these papers have much interest; but 
among them was the very best thing that he ever 
wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of satiri- 
cal pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's Inquiry into the 15 
Nature and Origin of Evil. 

6 In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first 
of a series of essays, entitled the Idler, During two 
years these essays continued to appear weekly. They 
were eagerly read, widely circulated, and, indeed, im- 20 
pudently pirated, while they were still in the original 
form, and had a large sale when collected into volumes. 
The Idler may be described as a second part of the 
Rambler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than 
the first part. 25 



34 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

While Johnson was busy with his Idlers, his mother, 
who had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lich- 
field. It was long since he had seen her ; but he had 
not failed to contribute largely, out of his small means, 
5 to her comfort. In order to defray the charges of her 
funeral, and to pay some debts which she had left, he 
wrote a little book in a single week, and sent off the 
sheets to the press without reading them over. A 
hundred pounds were paid him for the copyright; 

10 and the purchasers had great cause to be pleased with 
their bargain ; for the book was Rasselas. 

The success of Basselas was great, though such 
ladies as Miss Lydia Languish must have been 
grievously disappointed when they found that the new 

15 volume from the circulating library was little more 
than a dissertation on the author's favourite theme, 
the Vanity of Human Wishes; that the Prince of 
Abyssinia was without a mistress, and the princess 
without a lover ; and that the story set the hero and 

20 the heroine down exactly where it had taken them up. 
The style was the subject of much eager controversy 
The Monthly Review and the Critical Review took 
different sides. Many readers pronounced the writer 
a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of 

25 two syllables where it was possible to use a word of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 35 

six, and who could not make a waiting woman relate 
her adventures without balancing every noun with 
another noun, and 'every epithet with another epithet. 
Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight 
numerous passages in which weighty meaning was 5 
expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splen- 
dour. And both the censure and the praise were 
merited. 
Lj About the plan of Easselas little was said by the 
critics ; and yet the faults of the plan might seem 10 
to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently 
blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of 
time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation 
the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakspeare 
has not sinned in this, way more grievously than John- 15 
son. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are 
evidently meant to be'Abyssinians of the eighteenth 
century : for the Europe which Imlac describes is the 
Europe of the eighteenth century ; and the inmates of 
the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravita- 20 
tion which Newton discovered, and which was not fully 
received even at Cambridge till the eighteenth century. 
What a real company of Abyssinian s wouIg^ have been 
may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, 
not content with turning filthy savages, ignorant of 25 



36 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut from 
living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and en- 
lightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into 
ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. Lennox or Mrs. 

5 Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic system of 
England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of 
polygamy, a land where women are married without 
ever being seen, he introduced the flirtations and 
jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land where there 

io is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described 
as the indissoluble compact. " A youth and maiden 
meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, 
exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and 
dream of each other. Such," says Easselas, " is the 

15 common process of marriage." Such it may have 
been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at 
Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties? 
had little right to blame the poet who made Hector 
quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as 

20 flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi. 

I By such exertions as have been described, Johnson 

\ • supported himself till the year 1762. In that year a 

yf great change in his circumstances took place. He had 

from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. 

25 His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 37 

disguise both in his works and in his conversation. 
Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary he had, 
with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted 
bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. 
The excise, which was a favourite resource of Whig 5 
financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. He had 
railed against the commissioners of excise in language so 
coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting 
him. He had with difficulty been prevented from hold- 
ing up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of 10 
the meaning of the word "renegade.'' A pension he 
had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray 
his country ; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a 
stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the 
auT!noir*of these definitions would himself be pensioned. 15 
But that was a time of wonders. George the Third 
had ascended the throne ; and had, in the course of a 
few months, disgusted many of the old friends and 
conciliated many of the old enemies of his house. 
The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becom- 20 
ing loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmur- 
ing. Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss 
hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, 
who was a Tory, and could have no objection to John- 
son's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron 25 



38 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

of men of letters ; and Johnson was one of the most 
eminent and one of the most needy men of letters in 
Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was gra- 
ciously offered, and with very little hesitation accepted. 
^ «J5 This event produced a change in Johnson's whole 
way of life. For the first time since his boyhood he 
no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily 
toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety 
and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, 

10 to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up 
talking till four in the morning, without fearing either 
the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. 

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to 
perform. He had received large subscriptions for his 

15 promised edition of Shakspeare ; he had lived on those 
subscriptions during some years : and he could not 
without disgrace omit to perforin his part of the con- 
tract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him to make 
an effort ; and he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, 

20 notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolu- 
tions, month followed month, year followed year, and 
nothing was done. He prayed fervently against his 
idleness; he determined, as often as he received the 
sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and 

25 trifle away his time ; but the spell under which he 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 39 

lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes 
at this time are made up of self-reproaches. "My 
indolence," he wrote on Easter Eve in 1764, "has 
sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange 
oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what 5 
has become of the last year." Easter, 1765, came, and 
found him still in the same state. "My time," he 
wrote, " has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a 
dream that has left nothing behind. My memory 
grows confused, and I know not how the days pass 10 
over me." Happily for his honour, the charm which 
held him captive was at length broken by no gentle 
or friendly hand. He had been weak enough to pay 
serious attention to a story about a ghost which 
haunted a house in Cock Lane,° and had actually gone 15 
himself, with some of his friends, at. one in the morn- 
ing, to St. John's Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope 
of receiving a communication from the perturbed 
spirit. But the spirit, though adjured with all solem- 
nity, remained obstinately silent ; and it soon appeared 20 
that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing her- 
self by making fools of so many philosophers. Church- 
ill, who, confident in his powers, drunk with popu- 
larity, and burning with party spirit, was looking 
for some man of established fame and Tory politics 25 



40 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three 
cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where 
the book was which had been so long promised and 
so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great 
5 moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved 
effectual ; and in October, 1765, appeared, after a 
delay of nine years, the new edition of Shakspeare. 

This publication saved Johnson's character for hon- 
esty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities and 

io learning. The preface, though it contains some good 
passages, is not in his best manner. The most valu- 
able notes are those in which he had an opportunity of 
showing how attentively he had during many years 
observed human life and human nature. The best 

15 specimen is the note on the character of Polonius. 
Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm 
Meister's admirable examination of Hamlet. But 
here praise must end. It would be difficult to name 
a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great 

20 classic. The reader may turn over play after play 
without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or 
one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a passage 
which had baffled preceding commentators. Johnson 
had, in his Prospectus, told the world that he was 

25 peculiarly fitted for the task which he had under- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 41 

taken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been under 
the necessity of taking a wider view of the English 
language than any of his predecessors. That his 
knowledge of our literature was extensive is indis- 
putable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neg- 5 
lected that very part of our literature with which it is 
especially desirable that an editor of Shakspeare should 
be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a negative. 
Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the 
two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is 10 
not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of the 
Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and Ben.° Even 
from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might 
easily, in a few months, have made himself well ac- 
quainted with every old play that was extant. But 15 
it never seems to have occurred to him that this was 
a necessary preparation for the work which he had 
undertaken. He would doubtless have admitted that 
it would be the height of absurdity in a man who was 
not familiar with the works of iEschylus and Euripides 20 
to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured 
to publish an edition of Shakspeare, without having 
ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read 
a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, 
Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were 25 



42 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

noisy and scurrilous. Those who most loved and hon- 
oured him had little to say in praise of the manner in 
which he had discharged the duty of a commentator. 
He had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which 
5 had long lain heavy on his conscience, and he sank 
back into the repose from which the sting of satire 
had roused him. He long continued to live upon the 
fame which he had already won. He was honoured 
by the University of Oxford with a Doctor's degree, 

10 by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by 
the King with an interview, in which his Majesty most 
graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer 
would not cease to write. In the interval, however, 
between 1765 and 1775, Johnson published only two 

15 or three political tracts, the longest of which he could 
have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked 
as he worked on the Life of Savage and on Rasselas. 

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was 
active. The influence exercised by his conversation, 
20 directly upon those with whom he lived, and indi- 
rectly on the whole literary world, was altogether 
without a parallel. | His colloquial talents were indeed 
of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick dis- 
cernment, w>t, humour, immense knowledge of lit- 

25 erature and of life, and an infinite store of curious 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 43 

inecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better 
;han he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from 
lis lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely 
balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there 
vere no pompous triads, and little more than a fair 5 
proportion of words in osity and ation. All was sim- 
plicity, ease, and vigour. He uttered his short, 
weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, 
and a justness and energy of emphasis, of which the 
effect was rather increased than diminished by the 10 
rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gasp- 
ings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence 
generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made 
him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him 
Tom giving instruction or entertainment orally. To 15 
discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in 
language so exact and so forcible that it might have 
been printed without the alteration of a word, was to 
lim no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, 
;o fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready 20 
to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on any- 
body who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger 
In a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the 
same table with him in an eating-hous-3 But his 
conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as 25 



44 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose 
abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once 
expressed it, to send him back every ball that he 
threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves 
5 into a club,° which gradually became a formidable 
power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts 
pronounced by this conclave on new books were 
speedily known over all London, aud were sufficient 
to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the 

io sheets to the service of the trunk-maker and the 
pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange when 
we consider what great and various talents and ac- 
quirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith 
was the representative of poetry and light literature, 

15 Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence 
and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, 
the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist, 
of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his in- 
exhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and 

20 his consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the 
most constant attendants were two high-born and high- 
bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, 
but of widely different characters and habits ; Bennet 
Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, 

25 by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 45 

of his life ; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his 
amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious 
taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such 
a society was not easy. Yet even over such a society 
Johnson predominated. Burke might indeed have dis- 5 
puted the supremacy to which others were under the 
necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not gen- 
erally a very patient listener, was content to take the 
second part when Johnson was present ; and the club 
itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this 10 
day popularly designated as Johnson's club. 

/Among the members of this celebrated body was one 
to whom it has owed the greater part of its celebrity, 
yet who was regarded with little respect by his breth- 
ren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat 15 
among them. This was James Boswell, a young 
Scotch lawyer, heir to an honourable name and a fair 
estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, 
vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all 
who were acquainted with him. That he could not 20 
reason, that he had no wit, no humour, no eloquence, 
is apparent from his writings. And yet his writings 
are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern 
Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the English 
exists, either as a living or as a dead language. Nature 25 



46 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

had made hini a slave and an idolater. His mind re- 
sembled those creepers which the botanists call para- 
sites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the 
stems and imbibing the juices of stronger plants. He 
5 must have fastened himself on somebody. He might 
have fastened himself on Wilkes, and have become 
the fiercest patriot in the Bill of Eights Society. He 
might have fastened himself on Whitfield, and have 
become the loudest field preacher among the Calvinistic 

io Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on 
Johnson. The pair might seem ill matched. For 
Johnson had early been prejudiced against Boswell's 
country. To a man of Johnson's strong understanding 
and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation 

15 of Bos well must have been as teasing as the constant 
buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned ; a,nd 
Boswell was eternally catechising him on all kinds of 
subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as, 
" What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a 

20 tower with a baby ? " Johnson was a water drinker 
and Boswell was a winebibber, and indeed little better 
than a habitual sot. It was impossible that there 
should be perfect harmony between two such compan- 
ions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked 

25 into fits of passion, in which he said things which the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 47 

small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. 
Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During 
twenty years the disciple continued to worship the 
master : the master continued to scold the disciple, to 
sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordi- 5 
narily resided at a great distance from each other. 
Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edin- 
burgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. 
During these visits his chief business was to watch 
Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the 10 
conversation to subjects about which Johnson was 
likely to say something remarkable, and to fill quarto 
note books with minutes of what Johnson had said. 
In this way were gathered the materials, out of which 
was afterwards constructed the most interesting bio- 15 
graphical work in the world. 

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed 
a connection less important indeed to his fame, but 
much more important to his happiness, than his con- 
nection with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most 20 
opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and 
cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and liberal 
spirit, was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, 
engaging, vain, pert, young women, who are perpetually 
doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do 25 



48 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

or say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 
the Thrales became acquainted with Johnson, and the 
acquaintance ripened fast into friendship. They were 
astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his con- 
5 versation. They were flattered by finding that a man 
so widely celebrated preferred their house to any other 
in London. Even the peculiarities which seemed to 
unfit him for civilised society, his gesticulations, his 
rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way 

io in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness 
with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of melan- 
choly, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeness, his occa- 
sional ferocity, increased the interest which his new 
associates took in him. Tor these things were the 

15 cruel marks left behind by a life which had been one 
long conflict with disease and with adversity. In a 
vulgar hack writer such oddities would have excited 
only disgust. But in a man of genius, learning, and 
virtue, their effect was to add pity to admiration and 

20 esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment at the brew- 
ery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment 
at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A 
large part of every year he passed in those abodes, 
abodes which must have seemed magnificent and luxu- 

25 rious indeed, when compared with the dens in which 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 49 

he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures 
were derived from what the astronomer of his Abys- 
sinian tale called "the endearing elegance of female 
friendship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, 
coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by 5 
her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his 
reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he 
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most 
tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could pur- 
chase, no contrivance' that womanly ingenuity, set to 10 
work by womanly compassion, Q£ald devise was want- 
ing to his sick-room. He requited her kindness by an 
affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately 
tinged with a gallantry, which, though awkward, must 
have been more flattering than the attentions of a 15 
crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now 
obsolete, of Buck and Macaroni. It should seem that 
a full half of Johnson's life, during about sixteen 
years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He 
accompanied the family sometimes to Bath,° and some- 20 
times to Brighton, once to Wales, and once to Paris. 
But he had at the same time a house in one of the 
narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. 
In the garrets was his library, a large and miscellane- 
ous collection of books, falling to pieces and begrimed 25 



50 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

with dust. On a lower floor lie sometimes, but very 
rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, 
or a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Nor 
was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. 
5 It was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage 
of inmates that ever was brought together. At the 
head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old 
lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations 
were her blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of 

io her murmurs and reproaches, h^ gave an asylum to 
another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Des- 
moulins, whose family he had known many years 
before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the 
daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another desti- 

1 S tute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss 
Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly. 
An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and 
dosed coal heavers and hackney coachmen, and re- 
ceived for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses oJ 

20 gin, and sometimes a little copper, completed this 
strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at 
constant war with each other, and with Johnson's 
negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they trans- 
ferred their hostilities from the servant to the master, 

25 complained that a better table was not kept for them, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 51 

and railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad 
to make his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre 
Tavern. And yet he, who was generally the haughti- 
est and most irritable of mankind, who was but too 
prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight 5 
on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble 
and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, 
who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the work- 
house, insults more provoking than those for which he 
had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to 10 
Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. 
Desmoulins, Polly and Levett continued to torment 

Jim and to live upon him. 
//*The course of life which has been described was 

^interrupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an im- 15 
portant event. He had early read an account of the 
Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning 
that there was so near him a land peopled by a race 
which was still as rude and simple as in the middle 
ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with 20 
a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had 
ever seen frequently crossed his mind. But it is not 
probable that his curiosity would have overcome his 
habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the 
mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell impor- 25 



52 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

timed him to attempt the adventure, and offered to 
be his squire. At length, in August, 1773, Johnson 
crossed the Highland line, and plunged courageously 
into what was then considered, by most Englishmen, 
5 as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After wandering 
about two months through the Celtic region, some- 
times in rude boats which did not protect him from 
the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy poneys 
which could hardly bear his weight, he returned to 

io his old haunts with a mind full of new images and 
new theories. During the following year he employed 
himself in recording his adventures. About the be- 
ginning of 1775, his Journey to the Plebrides was 
published, and was, during some weeks, the chief 

15 subject of conversation in all circles in which any 
attention was paid to literature. The book is still 
read with pleasure. The narrative is entertaining ; 
the speculations, whether sound or unsound, are 
always ingenious ; and the style, though too stiff 

20 and pompous, is somewhat easier and more graceful 
than that of his early writings. His prejudice against 
the Scotch had at length become little more than 
matter of jest ; and whatever remained of the old 
feeling had been effectually removed by the kind 

25 and respectful hospitality with which he had been 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 53 

received in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, 
not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should 
praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that 
an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of 
England should not be struck by the bareness of 5 
Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure 
Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlight- 
ened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield ° at their head, 
were well pleased. But some foolish and ignorant 
Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little unpal- 10 
atable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, 
and assailed him whom they chose to consider as the 
enemy of their country with libels much more dis- 
honourable to their country than anything that he 
had ever said or written. They published paragraphs 15 
in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny 
pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused 
Johnson for being blear-eyed ; another for being a 
pensioner: a third informed the world that one of 
the Doctor's uncles had been convicted of felony in 2c 
Scotland, and had found that there was in that coun- 
try one tree capable of supporting the weight of an 
Englishman. Macpherson, whose Fingal had been 
proved in the Journey to be an impudent forgery, 
threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only 25 



54 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

effect of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the 
charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, 
and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, 
which, if the impostor had not been too wise to en- 
5 counter it, would assuredly have descended upon him, 
to borrow the sublime language of his own epic poem, 
" like a hammer on the red son of the furnace." 
YJ~Qi other assailants Johnson took no notice what- 
ever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into 

io controversy ; and he adhered to his resolution with 
a steadfastness which is the more extraordinary, 
because he was, both intellectually and morally, of 
the stuff of which controversialists are made. In 
conversation, he was a singularly eager, acute, and 

15 pertinacious disputant. When at a loss for good 
reasons, he had recourse to sophistry ; and when 
heated by altercation, he made unsparing use of 
sarcasm and invective. But when he took his pen 
in his hand, his whole character seemed to be changed. 

20 A hundred bad writers misrepresented him and re- 
viled him ; but not one of the hundred could boast 
of having been thought by him worthy of a refuta- 
tion, or even of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, 
MacNicols, and Hendersons did their best to annoy 

25 him, in the hope that he would give them importance 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 55 

by answering them. But the reader will in vain 
search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or 
Campbell, to MacMcol or Henderson. One Scotch- 
man, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learn- 
ing, defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin 5 
hexameter. 

" Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." 

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He 
had learned, both from his own observation and from 
literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the to 
place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not 
by what is written about them, but by what is written 
in them ; and that an author whose works are likely 
to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with 
detractors whose works are certain to die. He always 15 
maintained that fame w T as a shuttlecock which could 
be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as 
beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there 
were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in 
his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that 20 
no man was ever written down but by himself. 

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of 
the Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none 
of his envious assailants could have done, and to a 



56 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

certain extent succeeded in writing himself down. 
The disputes between England and her American 
colonies had reached a point at which no amicable 
adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently 
5 impending; and the ministers seem to have thought 
that the eloquence of Johnson might with advantage 
be employed to inflame the nation against the opposi- 
tion here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. 
He had already written two or three tracts in defence 

io of the foreign and domestic policy of the government ; 
and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were 
much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay 
on the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his 
Taxation no Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The 

15 very title was a silly phrase, which can have been 
recommended to his choice by nothing but a jing- 
ling alliteration which he ought to have despised. 
The arguments were such as boys use in debating 
societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as the 

20 gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced 
to own that, in this unfortunate piece, he could detect 
no trace of his master's powers. The general opinion 
was ' that the strong faculties which had produced 
the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to 

25 feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 57 

old man would best consult his credit by writing no 
more. 

fi But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, 
not because his mind was less vigorous than when he 
wrote Basselas in the evenings of a week, but because 5 
he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose 
for him, a subject such as he would at no time have 
been competent to treat. He was in no sense a states- 
man. He never willingly read or thought or talked 
about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary 10 
history, the history of manners ; but political history 
was positively distasteful to him. The question at 
issue between the colonies and the mother country 
was a question about which he had really nothing to 
say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must 15 
fail when they attempt to do that for which they are 
unfit ; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried 
to write comedies like those of Sheridan ; as Reynolds 
would have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint land- 
scapes like those of Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon 20 
had an opportunity of proving most signally that his 
failure was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay. 

S" - " On Easter Eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a 
meeting which consisted of forty of the first book- 
sellers in London, called upon him. Though he had 25 



58 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

some scruples about doing business at that season, he 
received his visitors with much civility. They came 
to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, 
from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to 
5 ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He 
readily undertook the task, a task for which he was 
pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary 
history of England since the Restoration was unri- 
valled. That knowledge he had derived partly from 

10 books, and partly from sources which had long been 
closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the 
talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who 
had long been lying in parish vaults ; from the recol- 
lections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had 

15 conversed with the wits of Button ; Gibber, who had 
mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists; 
Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of Swift ; 
and Savage, who had rendered services of no very hon- 
ourable kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sate 

20 down to his task with a mind full of matter. He had 
at first intended to give only a paragraph to every 
minor poet, and only four or five pages to the greatest 
name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism over- 
flowed the narrow channel. The work, which was 

25 originally meant to consist only of a few sheets, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 59 

swelled into ten volumes, small volumes, it is true, 
and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 
1779, the remaining six in 1781. 

¥ 6 The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of 
Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertaining 5 
as any novel. The remarks on life and on human 
nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The 
criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly 
and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied. 
For, however erroneous they may be, they are never 10 
silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled 
by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous 
and acute. They therefore generally contain a por- 
tion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated 
from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean 15 
something, a praise to which much of what is called 
criticism in our time has no pretensions. 

1 -y Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had 
appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, 
will turn to the other lives will be struck by the dif- 20 
ference of style. Since Johnson had been at ease in 
his circumstances he had written little and had talked 
much. When, therefore, he, after the lapse of years, 
resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had con- 
tracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate 25 



60 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

composition was less perceptible than formerly; and 
his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it 
had formerly wanted. The improvement may be dis- 
cerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the Heb- 
5 rides, and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it 
cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. 

V IT Among the Lives the best are perhaps those of Cow- 
ley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond 
all doubt, that of Gray. 

tcCf This great work at once became popular. There 
was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure: but 
even those who were loudest in blame were attracted 
by the book in spite of themselves. Malone com- 
puted the gains of the publishers at five or six 

15 thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly 
remunerated. Intending at first to write very short 
prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred 
guineas. The booksellers, when they saw how far 
his performance had surpassed his promise, added 

20 only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he 
did not despise, or affect to despise money, and though 
his strong sense and long experience ought to have 
qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to 
have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his 

25 literary bargains. He was generally reputed the first 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 61 

English writer of his time. Yet several writers of his 
time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never 
ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robertson 
received four thousand five hundred pounds for the 
History of Charles V. ; and it is no disrespect to the 5 
memory of Robertson to say that the History of 
Charles V. is both a less valuable and a less amusing 
book than the Lives of the Poets. 

* Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The 
infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That 10 
inevitable event of which he never thought without 
horror was brought near to him ; and his whole life 
was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often 
to pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year he 
lost what could never be replaced. The strange de- 15 
pendents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, 
in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by 
habit, dropped off one by one ; and, in the silence of 
his home, he regretted even the noise of their scold- 
ing matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no 20 
more ; and it would have been well if his wife had 
been laid beside him. But she survived to be the 
laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to 
draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her 
beyond anything in the world, tears far more bitter 25 



62 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

than he would have shed over her grave. With some 
estimable, and many agreeable qualities, she was not 
made to be independent. The control of a mind more 
steadfast than her own was necessary to her respecta- 
5 bility. While she was restrained by her husband, a 
man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in 
trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, 
her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white 
lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny 

io good humour. But he was gone ; and she was left an 
opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile 
fancy, and slender judgment. She soon fell in love 
with a music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody 
but herself could discover anything to admire. Her 

15 pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled 
hard against this degrading passion. But the struggle 
irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length 
endangered her health. Conscious that her choice was 
one which Johnson could not approve, she became 

20 desirous to escape from his inspection. Her manner 
towards him changed. She was sometimes cold and 
sometimes petulant. She did not conceal her joy when 
he left Streatham : she never pressed him to return ; 
and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a man- 

25 ner which convinced him that he was no longer a wel- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 63 

come guest. He took the very intelligible hints which 
she gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the 
Greek Testament in the library which had been formed 
by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer he com- 
mended the house and its inmates to the Divine pro- 5 
tection, and, with emotions which choked his voice and 
convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that beloved 
home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet 
Street, where the few and evil days which still re- 
mained to him were to run out. Here, in June, 1783, io 
he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he 
recovered, and which does not appear to have at all 
impaired his intellectual faculties. But other mala- 
dies came thick upon him. His asthma tormented 
him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their 15 
appearance. While sinking under a complication of 
diseases, he heard that the woman, whose friendship 
had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his 
life, had married an Italian fiddler; that all London 
was crying shame upon her ; and that the newspapers 20 
and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephe- 
sian matron and the two pictures in Hamlet. He 
vehemently said that he would try to forget her 
existence. He never uttered her name. Every 
memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the 25 



64 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

fire. She meanwhile fled from the laughter and the 
hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a laud 
where she was unknown, hastened across Mont Cenis, 
and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of con- 

5 certs and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great 

man with whose name hers is inseparably associated 

had ceased to exist. 

S~ I He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily 

affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling de- 

io scribed in that fine but gloomy paper which closes 
the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him 
as his last hour drew near. He fancied that he should 
be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern 
climate, and would probably have set out for Rome 

15 and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the 
journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of 
defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand 
pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the 
fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling 

20 to break in upon this hoard, and he seems to have 
wished even to keep its existence a secret. Some of 
his friends hoped that the government might be in- 
duced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds 
a year, but this hope was disappointed, and he re- 

25 solved to stand one English winter more. That 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 65 

winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his 
breath grew shorter ; the fatal water gathered fast, in 
spite of incisions which he, courageous against pain, 
but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make - 
deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which 5 
had mitigated his sufferings during months of sickness 
at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. 
The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and 
refused to accept fees from him* Burke parted from 
him with deep emotion. Windham sate much in the 10 
sick-room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own 
servant to watch at night by the bed. Frances Bur- 
ney,° whom the old man had cherished with fatherly 
kindness, stood weeping at the door; while Langtou, 
whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser 15 
and comforter at such a time, received the last press- 
ure of his friend's hand within. When at length the 
moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, 
the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. 
His temper became unusually patient and gentle ; he 20 
ceased to think with terror of death, and of that 
which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the 
mercy of God, and of the propitiation of Christ. In 
this serene frame of mind he died on the 13th of 
December, 1784. He was laid, a week later, in 25 



66 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of 
whom he had been the historian, — Cowley and 
Denham, Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and 
Addison. 
s-Qj Since his death the popularity of his works — the 
Lives of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human 
Wishes, excepted — has greatly diminished. His 
Dictionary has been altered by editors till it can 
scarcely be called his. An allusion to his Rambler 

io or his Idler is not readily apprehended in literary 
circles. The fame even of Basselas has growui some- 
what dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings 
may have declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange 
to say, is as great as ever. Boswell's book has done 

15 for him more than the best of his own books could do. 
The memory of other authors is kept alive by their 
works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of 
his works alive. The old philosopher is still among 
us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the 

20 shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, 
rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing 
his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans. 
No human being who has been more than seventy 
years in the grave is so well known to us. And it is 

25 but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with 



SAMUEL JOHNSON C7 

what he would himself have called the anfractuosities 
of his intellect and of his temper, serves only to 
strengthen our conviction that he was both a great 
and a good man. 



NOTES 

Page 1, line 4. Lichfield. An ancient Episcopal city of 
Staffordshire, one of the west midland counties of England. It 
is situated 115 miles northwest of London. 

9. Worcestershire. The county lying directly south of 
Staffordshire. 

13. Churchman. A member of the Established Church of 
England, — the American branch of which is the Protestant 
Episcopal Church. Members of other religious bodies — Pres- 
byterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, etc. — were styled Non- 
conformists or Dissenters. As the sovereign appoints through 
his ministers the bishops of the Church of England, who have 
seats in the House of Lords, " churchmanship " in former 
times went hand in hand with the support of the royal au- 
thority. At present, however, as the House of Commons has 
control of all royal appointments, and the bishops may belong 
to either party, this distinction has passed away. 

15. Sovereigns in possession. William III. and Mary, ac- 
knowledged sovereigns by the "Declaration of Rights," after 
the expulsion of James II. , the preceding year; Anne, who 
succeeded them in 1702, by virtue of the same ordinance ; and 
the monarchs of the House of Brunswick, who took the throne 
through the "Act of Settlement" of 1701. These acts estab- 
lished the power of the English people to decide, through their 
representatives, which branch of the royal family should rule. 

15. Jacobite. From ' ' Jacobus, "the Latin form of ' ' James. ' ' 
A supporter of the exiled James II, and afterwards of his son 
James, and grandson, Charles, who were respectively styled by 
the opposing party, the "Old Pretender" and the "Young 

69 



70 NOTES [Pages 1-3 

Pretender." A Jacobite believed in strict hereditary succes- 
sion ; in the divine right of kings ; and that no king, whatever 
his misconduct, could forfeit his throne. 

P. 2, 1. 10. The royal touch. The vulgar English name for 
scrofula, "the king's evil," is derived from the long-cherished 
belief that it could be healed by the royal touch. In this was 
supposed to inhere some of the "Grace of God" which gave 
the right of sovereignty to true kings. Old historians assert 
that multitudes of patients were cured by this treatment. 
Queen Anne was the last English sovereign who touched for the 
king's evil. Henry VII. introduced the practice of presenting 
the patient with a small gold coin. 

17. Her hand was applied in vain. Perhaps the Jacobitism 
of Johnson's parents prevented the usual cure. "The old 
Jacobites considered that this power did not descend to Mary, 
William, or Anne, as they did not possess a full hereditary title ; 
or, in other words, did not rule by divine right. The kings of 
the house of Brunswick have, we believe, never put this power 
to the proof ; and the office for the ceremony which appeared 
in our liturgy as late a^ 1719, has been silently omitted. The 
exiled princes of the house of Stuart are supposed to have in- 
herited this virtue. . . . When Prince Charles Edward was at 
Holyroodhouse in Oct., 1745, he, although only claiming to be 
Prince of Wales and regent, touched a female child for the 
king's evil, who in twenty-one days is said to have been per- 
fectly cured. " — The English Cyclopaedia. 

P. 3, 1. 11. Attic poetry and eloquence refers to the master- 
pieces of the great orators and dramatists of Athens, the chief 
city of ancient Greece. 

15. Augustan refers to the Roman emperor, Augustus 



Page 3] NOTES 71 

Caesar. During his reign (27 b.c-14 a.d.) Latin literature 
reached its highest point of technical excellence in the works of 
Horace, Livy, Ovid, and Virgil. 

17. The great public schools of England, the best known 
of which are Eton and Rugby, are not supported by taxation 
like our public schools, but by endowments and the tuition of 
pupils. The classes are called " forms," the " sixth " being the 
highest. Read Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes, 
an interesting story of life at Rugby. English school life has 
changed but little during the last two or three centuries. 

21. The great restorers of learning. One of the chief re- 
sults of the Crusades was an awakening and broadening of the 
thought of western Europe. In the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries many Italian scholars gave themselves up to the en- 
thusiastic study of Greek and Roman literature, which had 
been practically neglected during the "Dark Ages." This 
movement is known as the Revival of Learning. Among the 
prominent restorers of learning were Petrarch, Boccaccio, 
Poggio, iEneas Sylvius, Pope Nicholas V. ; and, outside of Italy, 
Erasmus, in Flanders ; Casaubon and the Scaligers, in France; 
and Sir Thomas More, in England. Read George Eliot's Bom- 
ola, a novel whose scene is laid in Florence at the close of the 
fifteenth century. 

23. Petrarch's works. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1,°/ 4) was 
the greatest scholar of his day, and the first of modern writers 
to write really classical Latin, besides being one of the first of 
western Europeans to undertake the study of Greek litera- 
ture. He left numerous works in Latin prose and verse, but 
his fame rests on his exquisite sonnets and canzonets in the 
Italian vernacular, expressing his love for the beautiful Laura 



72 NOTES [Pages 3-5 

de Sade. See Symonds's Benaissance in Italy, Italian Litera- 
ture, Part L, Ch. II., p. 84. 

P. 4, 1. 11. At either university. In Johnson's time Eng- 
land had two universities: Oxford, supposed to have been 
founded by Alfred the Great in the ninth century, but certainly 
in existence before the Norman Conquest ; and Cambridge, 
which originated in a monastic school established 1110. In the 
nineteenth century three new universities were founded, — 
London, Durham, and Victoria. 

14. Pembroke College. Founded 1620. One of the nine- 
teen colleges which composed the University of Oxford in the 
eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century two new colleges 
were added. Read Tom Brown at Oxford, by Thomas Hughes ; 
and Verdant Green, by Cuthbert Bede. 

21. Macrobius. A Latin grammarian of the fifth century 
a.d. His works contain many valuable historical, mythological, 
and critical observations, and were much read during the Mid- 
dle Ages. The "Nonnes Preeste " in Chaucer's Canterbury 
Tales thus refers to him : — 

" Macrobeus, that writ the avisioun 
In Affrick of the worthy Cipioun, 
Affermeth dremes, and seith that they been 
Warninge of thinges that men after seen." 

P. 5, 1. 3. Christ Church. One of the most fashionable ol 
the Oxford colleges. Founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1526. 

9. Gentleman commoner. A student of "gentle" (i.e. avis 
tocratic) birth, who pays for his commons (meals in the college 
hall) , his room, and college fees ; as distinguished from a studenl 
supported by a " foundation " or scholarship. In Johnson's tinu 
special privileges were enjoyed by the sons of noblemen. 



Pages 5-6] NOTES 73 

17. The ringleader. This passage is a good example of 
Macaulay's tendency to exaggerate for the sake of picturesque 
effect. It is founded on the following from Boswell's Life of 
Johnson : "I have heard from some of his contemporaries that 
he was generally seen lounging at the college gate, with a circle 
of young students round him whom he was entertaining with 
wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to 
rebellion against the College discipline, which in his maturer 
years he so much extolled." Note how in retelling the story 
Macaulay, by his choice of words, gives it a much higher color. 
There is, however, no authority for "every mutiny." 

19. Abilities and acquirements. Dr. Adams said, " I was 
his nominal tutor ; but he was above my mark." — Boswell. 

20. Pope's " Messiah." Alexander Pope (1688-1744) domi- 
nated English verse through nearly all of the eighteenth century. 
He is deficient in originality and poetic elevation ; but has not 
been surpassed as a polished versifier, satirist, and moralizer in 
rhyme. Next to Shakespeare he is the most quoted of English 
writers. His best work is the Essay on Man. 

22. Virgilian. The poems of Publius Virgilius Maro (70-19 
b.c), the JEneid, the Eclogues, and the Georgics, are the most 
polished examples of Latin versification. 

P. 6. 1. 1. Bachelor of Arts. "B.A.", the first degree 
given to a student at his graduation. The next degree is 
" M. A. , " or Master of Arts. The third is Doctor — of Divinity, 
Laws, or Philosophy ; "D.D., L.L.D., Ph.D." 

23. Absolving felons and setting aside wills. Defendants 
ire acquitted and wills are set aside by the law courts upon 
proof of insanity. Note how Macaulay creates a powerful 
picture by stating special incidents, and how by the use of the 



74 NOTES [Pages 6-8 

word "would" (see page 7, line 1), he gives the impression 
that these were habitual occurrences. 

P. 8, 1. 1. His religion. Although Johnson was undoubtedly 
a confirmed hypochondriac, yet that his religion was a great 
help and comfort to him is shown by numerous letters and con- 
versations reported by Boswell. The following prayer, com- 
posed and offered up by Johnson on undertaking the Bambler, 
is characteristic : — 

" Almighty God, the Giver of all good things, without whose 
help all labor is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom 
is folly ; grant I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking, thy 
Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may pro- 
mote thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others : Grant 
this, Lord, for the sake of thy son Jesus Christ. Amen." 
— BoswelFs Life of Johnson. 

8. Too dim to cheer him. "Johnson as drawn by Boswell 
is too 'awful, melancholy, and venerable.' Hawkins (Life, 
p. 258) says, that ' in the talent of humour there hardly ever 
was Johnson's equal, except perhaps among the old comedians.' 
Murphy writes (Life, p. 139) : ' Johnson was surprised to be 
told, but it is certainly true, that with great powers of mind, 
wit and humour were his shining talents.' Mrs. Piozzi confirms 
this. 'Mr. Murphy,' she writes (Anecdotes, p. 205), 'always 
said he was incomparable at buffoonery.' She adds (p. 298): 
' He would laugh at a stroke of genuine humour, or sudden 
sally of odd absurdity as heartily and freely as I ever yet saw 
any man ; and, though the jest was often such as few felt 
besides himself, yet his laugh was irresistible, and was observed 
immediately to produce that of the company, not merely fron 
the notion that it was proper to laugh when he did, but froir 



Pages 8-10] NOTES 75 

lack of power to forbear it.' Miss Burney records : ' Dr. John- 
son has more fun and comical humour, and love of nonsense 
about him than almost anybody I ever saw.'" — G. Birkbeck 
Hill's Boswell, Vol. II., p. 261, note. Boswell himself says : " I 
passed many hours with him on the 17th [May, 1775] of which 
I find all my memorial is ' much laughing. ' It should seem that 
he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, 
and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. 
Johnson's laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his 
manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies 
described it drolly enough : ' He laughs like a rhinoceros.' " 

25. Usher of a grammar school. In England "grammar 
schools" are those in which Latin and Greek are "grammati- 
cally taught." An " usher" is a subordinate teacher. 

P. 9, 1. 7. A Latin book about Abyssinia. Voyage to Abys- 
sinia, by Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit. For this work Johnson 
received five guineas (about $25), and he did not consider him- 
self ill paid. 

9. Politian. Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) occupies a fore- 
most place in the "Revival of Learning" in virtue of his vigor 
and originality. He was a close friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, 
the greatest ruler of Florence ; and his poems, both in Latin 
and Italian, are of very high merit. 

19. Queensberrys and Lepels. Leading families of the Brit- 
ish nobility. 

23. His Titty. Macaulay has changed the nickname to 
make it more ridiculous. According to Boswell, Johnson called 
her Tetty or Tetsey, a provincial nickname for Elizabeth, and 
similar to Betty or Betsey. 

P. 10, 1. 1. As poor as himself. Another of Macaulay's 



76 NOTES [Page 10 

exaggerations. " The author of the Life and Memoirs of Dr. 
Johnson says : ' Mrs. Porter's husband died insolvent, but her 
settlement was secured. She brought her second husband seven 
or eight hundred pounds, a great part of which was expended 
in fitting up a house for a boarding school.' . . . After nearly 
twenty months of married life, when he went to London, ' he 
had,' Boswell says, 'a little money.' It was not till a year 
later that he began to write for The Gentleman 1 s Magazine. If 
Mrs. Johnson had not money, how did she and her husband live 
from July, 1735, to the spring of 1738 ? It could scarcely have 
been on the profits made from their school." — Hill's Boswell, 
Vol. I., p. 95, note 3. 

4. A suitor who might have been her son. Contrast with 
Macaulay's picture the following from Carlyle's Essay on 
BoswelVs Life of Johnson : — 

"Finally, the choicest terrestrial good: a Friend, who will be 
Wife to him! Johnson's marriage with the good Widow Porter 
has been treated with ridicule by many mortals, who appar- 
ently had no understanding thereof. That the purblind, seamy- 
faced Wild-man, stalking lonely, woe-stricken, like some Irish 
Gallowglass with peeled club, whose speech no man knew, 
whose look all men both laughed at and shuddered at, should 
find any brave female heart to acknowledge, at first sight and 
hearing of him, ' This is the most sensible man I ever met 
with ; ' and then, with generous courage, to take him to itself, 
and say, ' Be thou mine ; be thou warmed here, and thawed to 
life!' — in all this, in the kind Widow's love and pity for him, 
in Johnson's love and gratitude, there is actually no matter for 
ridicule. Their wedded life, as is the common lot, was made 
up of drizzle and dry weather ; but innocence and worth dwelt 
in it; and, when death had ended it, a certain sacredness : 
Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was always venerable 
and noble." 



Pages 10-12] NOTES 77 

13. " Pretty creature ! " Mrs. Thrale says : "The picture I 
found of her at Lichfield was very pretty, and her daughter 
said it was like. Mr. Johnson has told me that her hair was 
eminently beautiful, quite blonde like that of a baby." — Piozzi's 
Anecdotes, p. 148. In Johnson's private memoranda of his 
tour in France, fourteen years after his wife's death, is the 
following : " The sight of palaces, and other great buildings, 
leaves no very distinct images unless to those who talk of them. 
As I entered, my wife was in my mind ; she would have been 
pleased. Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased." 

24. David Garrick (1716-1779) was the greatest of all Eng- 
lish actors. He did more than any one else to restore Shake- 
speare's plays to the English stage. As an actor, he was equally 
at home in the highest poetry of tragedy and the lowest jests of 
farce. Read Goldsmith's poem Retaliation for a capital sketch 
of his character. In it occurs these often quoted lines, — 

" On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 
'Twas only that, when he was off, he was acting." 

Garrick was the source of all the ridicule heaped upon Mrs. 
Johnson. Percy says, "As Johnson kept Garrick much in 
awe when present, David, when his back was turned, repaid 
his restraint with ridicule of him and his Dulcinea, which 
should be read with much abatement." 

P. 11, 1. 6. Irene. The story of the play deals with the love 
of Mahomet the Great, the Turkish conqueror of Constanti- 
nople, for a beautiful Greek captive. Read The Prince of 
India, by Lew Wallace, for this tale. 

18. Secretary of state. See Appendix, p. 126 and p. 157. 

P. 12, 1. 8. Thomson, James (1700-1748). The first Eng- 
lish poet to take nature for his subject. Besides the Seasons, 



( 



78 NOTES [Pages 12-13 

* his best-known works are the Castle of Indolence and the song 
TV. \ Rule Brittania. 

\W 9. Fielding, Henry (1707-1754). The greatest English 
novelist of the eighteenth century ; also a playwright of no 
mean ability. Two of his novels, Tom Jones and Joseph 
Andrews, although disfigured by the coarseness common to his 
age, are among the masterpieces of English fiction. 

10. The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay (1685-1732), was the 
most successful dramatic piece produced in England during the 
first half of the eighteenth century. The characters are all 
taken from low life, and the hero is a highwayman ; but it is 
a scathing satire on the fashionable society of the day. It 
appeared in 1726, and isstill occasionally represented. The 
best part is the songs. From one of these come the often 
quoted lines, — V \r 

" How happy could I be with either, 
Were t'other dear charmer away." 

20. Porter's knot. " A kind of double shoulder-pad, with a^ 
loop passing round the forehead ; the whole roughly resembling 
a horse-collar, used by London market porters for carrying their 
burdens." — Cassell's Encyclopedic Dictionary. "Perhaps 
originally a rope tied or knotted into a loop." — Murray's, 
Dictionary. 

P. 13, 1. 12. Drury Lane. A street in the heart of London. 
In the seventeenth century it had been a fashionable residence 
district ; but in Johnson's time it was ceasing to be respectable. 

25. Subterranean ordinaries. Cheap eating-houses situated 
in cellars. Alamode beef was " scraps and remainders of beef 
boiled down into a thick soup or stew." — Murray's Dictionary. 



Pages 13-14] NOTES 79 

The ancient hare and the rancid meat pie are single instances 
which Macaulay magnifies into habitual occurrences by the use 
of the word "whenever. 11 There are many authentic anec- 
dotes, reported by Boswell and others, to show that Johnson, 
though a voracious eater, fully appreciated good cooking. Bos- 
well, who dined with him, found the meal excellent though 
plain ; and Hawkins speaks of "his not inelegant dinners." 

P. 14, 1. 8. Rude even to ferocity. "Once Johnson is said 
to have taken up a chair at the theatre, upon which a man had 
seated himself during his temporary absence, and to have 
tossed it and its occupant bodily into the pit." — Leslie Stephen's 
Life of Johnson. 

12. Societies where he was treated with courtesy and kind- 
ness. "To obviate all the reflections which have gone round 
the world to Johnson's prejudice, by applying to him the epithet 
of a bear, let me impress upon my readers a just and happy 
saying of my friend Goldsmith, who knew him well, 'Johnson, 
to be sure, has a roughness in his manner ; but no man alive has 
a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but his skin.'' " 
— Boswell's Life of Johnson. " Reynolds said : 'Johnson had 
one virtue which I hold one of the most difficult to practise. 
After the heat of contest was over, if he had been informed that, 
his antagonist resented his rudeness ; he was the first to seek 
after a reconciliation.' Johnson wrote to Dr. Taylor in 1756 : 
* When I am musing alone, I feel a pang for every moment that 
any human being has by my peevishness or obstinacy spent in 
uneasiness.' " — Hill's Bosivell, Vol. II., p. 256, note. 

15. Osborne. " It has been confidently related, with many 
embellishments, that Johnson one day knocked Osborne down 
in his shop, with a folio, and put his foot upon his neck. The 



80 NOTES [Pages 14-15 

simple truth I had from Johnson himself. ' Sir, he was imper- 
tinent to me, and I beat him. But it was not in his shop : it 
was in my own chamber.' " — Boswell. 

"There is nothing to tell, dearest lady, but that he was inso- 
lent and I beat him, and that he was a blockhead and told of it, 
which I should never have done. ... I have beat many a fel- 
low, but the rest had the wit to hold their tongues. ' ' — Mrs. 
Piozzi's Anecdotes of Johnson, p. 233. 

19. Harleian Library. The famous library collected by 
Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, which had been purchased by 
Osborne. Johnson wrote the introduction to the catalogue, and 
the Latin accounts of the books. 

24. The Gentleman's Magazine, originated by Edward Cave 
in January, 1731, is still in existence. Cave used the nom de 
plume " Sylvanus Urban" as editor; and the title is the first 
application of the word " magazine " to a periodical. Johnson 
had a high opinion of Cave, whose life he afterward wrote. 
The story is told, that, at some of the dinners Cave gave his 
contributors, a plate was passed to Johnson, who was seated 
behind a screen, as his clothes were too ragged to permit his 
appearing at table. 

P. 15, 1. 8. Senate of Lilliput. Every one should read Gulli- 
ver' 1 s Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, by Swift. The stories 
are so well told that they remain deeply interesting to this day 
though the objects of Swift's merciless satire are well-nigh for- 
gotten. " Blefuscu," "Mildendo," "sprugs," and " Nardac " 
are terms taken from the Voyages. Johnson wrote the debates 
from November, 1740, to February, 1743. He told Boswell that 
" as soon as he found they were thought genuine he determined 
he would write no more of them, ' for he would not be accessory 



Pages 15-16] NOTES 81 

to the propagation of a falsehood.' " It is likely that this tender- 
ness of conscience cost Cave a good deal. Hawkins writes that, 
while Johnson composed the Debates, the sale of the Magazine 
increased from ten to fifteen thousand copies a month. 

11. Lord Hardwicke. Philip Yorke (1090-1764) was one of 
the strongest supporters of Sir Robert Walpole, who made him 
Lord Chancellor in 1733. See Green's History of the English 
People, Ch. IX., Sec. X. Hickrad is a caricature of Lord 
Hardwicke's name. 

12. William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (1684-1764), was for 
some time the chief opponent of Sir Robert Walpole. He was 
the leader of a faction that called itself "The Patriots." The 
Speaker of the House of Commons described him as "having 
the most popular parts for public speaking of any great man 
he ever knew." A contemporary epigram says of him, — 

"... Billy, of all Bob's foes, 
The wittiest in verse and prose." 

22. Capulets and Montagues were the two families whose 
feud forms the background of Shakespeare's tragedy Borneo 
and Juliet. 

23. The Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens. In 
the later days of the Roman Empire, the chariot races in the 
hippodrome at Constantinople were the chief amusement of the 
degenerate populace, which divided into factions named from 
the colors worn by the drivers. The animosities of these fac- 
tions sometimes led to serious riots, and even to incendiarism 
and massacre. An interesting account is in Gibbon's Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. XL., Sec. II. 

P. 16, 1. 2. Sacheverell was a " High Church," Tory clergy- 



82 NOTES [Page 16 

man, of mediocre ability, who gained a place in the history 
of England by two sermons delivered in 1709. In these he 
attacked the principles of the revolution of 1688, asserted 
the doctrine of non-resistance to kings, and decried the "Act 
of Toleration." The ministry foolishly prosecuted him, and 
the public excitement which this aroused led to the over- 
throw of the Whig party, and the fall of the Duke of Marl- 
borough. Read Green's History of the English People, Ch. IX., 
Sec. IX. 

13. Tom Tempest is a character in No. 10 of the Idler. 
Johnson describes him as a man " of integrity, where no factious 
interest is to be promoted ; " and a " lover of truth," when not 
" heated with political debate." And then continues : — 

" Tom Tempest is a steady friend of the house of Stuart. 
He can recount the prodigies that have appeared in the sky, 
and the calamities that have afflicted the nation every year from 
the Revolution ; and is of opinion, that, if the exiled family 
had continued to reign, there would have been neither worms in 
our ships nor caterpillars in our trees. He wonders that the 
nation was not awakened by the hard frost to a revocation of 
the true king, and is hourly afraid that the whole island may be 
lost in the sea. He believes that King William burned White- 
hall that he might steal the furniture ; and that Tillotson died 
an Atheist. Of Queen Anne he speaks with more tenderness ; 
owns that she meant well, and can tell by whom and why she 
was poisoned. In the succeeding reigns all has been corruption, 
malice, and design. He believes that nothing ill has ever hap- 
pened for these forty years by chance or errour ; he holds that 
the battle of Dettingen was won by mistake and that of Fon- 
tenoy lost by contract ; that the Victory was sunk by a private 
order; that Gornhill was fired by emissaries of the Council; 
and that the arch of Westminster-bridge was so contrived as to 
sink on purpose, that the Nation might be put to charge. He 



Page 16] NOTES 83 

considers the new road to Islington as an encroachment on 
liberty, and often asserts that broad wheels will be the ruin of 
England." 

A man who can jest in this comical fashion about the ex- 
tremists of his own party, can hardly be the bigot that Macau- 
lay portrays so vividly. 

13. Charles II. (1660-1685) and James II. (1685-1688). 
The last two reigning sovereigns of the male line of the Stuarts ; 
the former noted for his profligacy, the latter for his bigotry. 
Read Green's History, Ch. IX., Sec. III., and Sec. VI. 

14. Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles 
I., and leader in the oppression of the Puritans. He was exe- 
cuted by ordinance of Parliament, January 10, 1644-1645. Ma- 
caulay, whose Whig prejudices were as strong as Johnson's Tory 
prepossessions, is unjust to Laud, who was a man of great 
mental attainments. Green, in his History, Ch. VIII., Sec. 
IV., gives an impartial view of the great prelate. 

18. Hampden, John (1594-1643). One of the chief opponents 
of the arbitrary measures by which Charles I. endeavored to 
make the English monarchy absolute. See Green's History, 
Ch. VIII. , Sees. III. and V. 

20. Ship money. One of the means by which Charles tried 
to raise money in 1634, without calling a parliament. Hamp- 
den was foremost in the opposition to this measure. See Green's 
History, Ch. VIII. , Sec. V. 

21. Falkland. Lucius Cary, Viscount of (1610-1643). In 
the beginning of his career he was distinguished by his zeal for 
Parliament and the constitution of his country ; but, later, 
offended by what he considered the excesses of the popular 
party, he took sides with Charles I. He was killed in the 



84 NOTES [Pages 16-17 

Civil War. See Green's History, Ch. XIII., Sec. VI., and 
Ch. IX., Sec. I. 

22. Clarendon. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1608- 
1674), like Falkland, took at first the side of Parliament ; but at 
the outbreak of the Civil War, joined the king. At the Restora- 
tion he was made Lord High Chancellor of England. His daugh- 
ter Anne became the wife of the Duke of York, afterwards 
James II., and the mother of Mary and Anne, queens of Eng- 
land. Why is Macaulay's use of the names of Falkland and 
Clarendon in this instance unfair ? 

22. Roundheads. A term of ridicule applied by the royal- 
ists to the supporters of Parliament against Charles I., on 
account of the fashion they had adopted of wearing the hair 
closely cut. The "Cavaliers," as the king's adherents were 
called, wore long flowing curls. 

P. 17, 1. 7. Mangled with the shears. Criminals frequently 
had nose and ears cut off in " the good old times." 

9. Dissenters, etc. The Whig party, which held almost 
uninterrupted power from 1688 to 1760, tolerated the Dissent- 
ers, favored the mercantile classes, created the national debt, 
enacted that parliaments should be elected at least every seven 
years, and made alliances with continental European Powers. 
The "excise " was an internal tax on liquors first introduced in 
the Long Parliament in 1643, and increased during the wars 
with France. It was vehemently opposed by the old-fashioned 
Tories. 

15. The Great Rebellion. During the Civil War between 
Charles I. and Parliament, the Scotch were the first to oppose 
the king, and when, after his defeat by Cromwell at Naseby, 
Charles threw himself upon the loyalty of the Scotch army, he 



Pages 17-19] NOTES 85 

was surrendered by them to Parliament for the sum of £400,000. 
This was in "payment of all the arears of the subsidies which 
were owed them for their services in England." As Charles 
was executed in 1649 by order of Parliament, one may easily 
understand why the good Tory Johnson held the Scotch respon- 
sible for the death of the " Martyr King." See Green's History, 
Ch. VII. 

P. 18, 1. 6. Juvenal and Horace were the two greatest Roman 
satirists. Horace (65-8, b.c.) belonged to the Augustan age, 
while Juvenal flourished about the end of the first century 
(60-140 a.d.). They respectively represent the two schools of 
satire, — that of easy-going ridicule, and that of moral indigna- 
tion. Horace was a man of the world ; and Juvenal, a reformer. 
Juvenal "uses satire, not as a branch of comedy, which it was 
to Horace, but as an engine for attacking the brutalities of 
tyranny, the corruptions of life and taste, the crimes, the follies, 
and the frenzies of a degenerate state of society. He has great 
humor of a scornful, austere, and singularly pungent kind, and 
many noble flashes of high moral poetry. Dryden's translations 
of five of the satires are among his best works." 

10. Horace. See preceding note. 

18. Johnson's London. The following lines give some idea 
of the character of the poem : — ■ 

" This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, 
Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed, 
But here more slow where all are slaves to gold, 
Where looks are merchandise, and smiles are sold, 
Where, won by bribes, by flatterers implored, 
The groom retails the favours of his lord." 

P. 19, 1. 9. The attempt failed. At Pope's suggestion, Lord 



86 NOTES TPage 19 

Gower used his influence with the authorities of Dublin Univer- 
sity to obtain for Johnson the degree of M. A. , which the posi- 
tion required. It was well for English literature that Johnson 
was forced for years yet to support himself by his pen. He was 
not at all fitted to be a schoolmaster. 

17. Pamphleteers and indexmakers. Most of the sort of 
matter which nowadays is published in our multifarious period- 
icals appeared then in pamphlet form ; and the making of in- 
dexes to learned works was a common means of support to 
unknown scholars. 

18. Boyse, Samuel (1708-1749), a forgotten poet, some of 
whose lines to the Deity are quoted admiringly by Fielding in 
Tom Jones, Book VII., Ch. I. He was probably one of the 
most shiftless of the whole breed of " Grub Street poets." He 
failed to get a good position in Edinburgh, because he would 
not go out on a rainy day to make his application. Johnson 
" told how he had once exerted himself for his comrade in mis- 
ery, and collected enough money by sixpences to get the poet's 
clothes out of pawn. Two days afterward Boyse had spent the 
money, and was found in bed covered only with a blanket, 
through two holes in which he passed his arms to write. Boyse, 
it appears, when still in this position, would lay out his last 
half guinea to buy mushrooms and truffles for his last scrap 
of beef." — Stephen's Life of Johnson. (See Appendix, pp. 
130-134.) 

23. Hoole. All we know of him is what Johnson said to 
Hoole's nephew, John Hoole, the translator of Tasso : " Sir, I 
knew him ; we called him the metaphysical tailor. He was 
of a club in Old Street with me, and George Psalmanazar, 
and some others." And then John Hoole spoke of his 






Pages 19-20] NOTES 87 

uncle's tracing diagrams on his cutting board. — Boswell's Life 
of Johnson. 

P. 20, 1. 2. George Psalmanazar was a Frenchman who for 
a time achieved quite a notoriety in England by pretending to 
be a native of Formosa and a convert to Christianity. In 1704 
he published his Historical and Geographical Description of 
Formosa. ' ' So gross is the forgery that it almost passes belief 
that it was widely accepted as a true narrative." Later, being 
stricken by conscience, he made a public confession of his im- 
posture and supported himself for the rest of a long life by 
translating, etc. Johnson said of him : " He had never seen the 
close of the life of anyone that he wished so much his own to 
resemble as that of him, for its purity and devotion." He was 
asked if he ever contradicted him. "I should as soon," said 
he, "have thought of contradicting a bishop." When he was 
asked whether he had mentioned Formosa before him, he said, 
"he was afraid to mention even China." Johnson used to 
meet him at an alehouse. "Johnson in an alehouse club, with 
a metaphysical tailor on one side of him, and an aged writer on 
the other side of him, ' who spoke English with the city accent 
and coarsely enough,' and whom he would never venture to 
contradict, is a Johnson that we cannot easily imagine." — 
Hill's Boswell, Vol. III., Appendix A. 

8. Richard Savage (1698-1743). His most successful 
poem was the Wanderer, which contains some strong lines, but 
is now forgotten. In 1727 he killed a man in a tavern brawl, 
was confined in Newgate (the chief prison of London), and 
condemned to death. The intercession of the Countess of 
Hertford with the queen obtained his pardon. Her Majesty 
afterward gave him an allowance of £50 a year, which he 



88 NOTES [Pages 20-23 

usually squandered in a week of debauchery. He is re- 
membered now only for his connection with Johnson. Of 
this intimacy Carlyle writes: "Neither, though Johnson is 
obscure and poor, need the highest enjoyment of existence, that 
of heart freely communing with heart, be denied him. Savage 
and he wander homeless through the streets ; without bed, yet 
not without friendly converse ; such another conversation not, 
it is like, producible in the proudest drawing-room of London. 
Nor, under the void Night, upon the hard pavement, are their 
own woes the only topic : nowise ; they ' will stand by their 
country,' they there, the two Backwoodsmen of the Brick 
Desert ! " — Essay on BoswelVs Johnson. 

24. Covent Garden (properly Convent Garden) was originally 
the garden of Westminster Abbey. It is now a square cele- 
brated for its great market of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. 
In the seventeenth century it was a fashionable quarter of 
the city. 

P. 21, 1. 21. Grub Street. " The name of a street in London 
much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and 
temporary poems ; whence any mean production is called Grub 
Street. " — Johnson's Dictionary. 

P. 22, 1. 10. Warburton, William, Bishop of Gloucester (1698- 
1779). One of the most noted English theologians and philo- 
sophical writers. 

21. Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773). His famous Letters to 
his Son, which are still widely read, give an excellent picture 
of the manners and morals of the English aristocracy of the 
eighteenth century. The character of Sir John Chester in 
Dickens's Barnahy Budge is founded on Lord Chesterfield. 

P. 23, 1. 3. Johnson's homage. The following passage from 



Pages 23-24] NOTES 89 

Johnson's Prospectus is interesting as a contrast to the famous 
Letter (see note, p. 31, 1. 15) written some years later. "And 
I may hope, my Lord, that since you, whose authority in our 
language is so generally acknowledged, have commissioned me 
to declare my own opinion, I shall be considered as exercising 
a kind of vicarious jurisdiction ; and that the power which 
might have been denied to my own claim, will be readily 
allowed me as the delegate of your Lordship." 

12. Ate like a cormorant. The following passage from the 
Letters is considered to be Chesterfield's description of Johnson: 

"... A respectable Hottentot, who throws his meat any- 
where but down his throat. This absurd person was not only 
uncouth in manners and warm in dispute, but behaves in 
exactly the same way to superiours, equals, and inferiours ; and 
therefore, by a necessary consequence, absurdly to two of them." 

16. Inhospitable door. Johnson in his Dictionary defined 
I patron " as " commonly a wretch who supports with insolence 
and is paid with flattery." In later years he said that "Lord 
Chesterfield was dignified but he was insolent," and that "his 
manner was exquisitely elegant." And again: "This man I 
thought had been a lord among wits ; but I find he is only a wit 
among Lords." Johnson always maintained that the " respect- 
able Hottentot " was not meant for him. " Sir," said he, "Lord 
Chesterfield never saw me eat in his life." But the opinion of 
Boswell was otherwise. 

P. 24, 1. 4. Wolsey, Thomas (1471-1530). The great Eng- 
lish cardinal and prime minister of Henry VIII. He was dis- 
graced on account of his counsel and conduct in the matter of 
the divorce of Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon. See 
Shakespeare's Henry VIII. , and Green's History, Ch. VI. , Sec. V. 



90 NOTES [Page 24 

7. Sejanus, ^Elius. A Roman knight, to whom Tiberius, 
the successor of Augustus, intrusted the entire government of 
the empire, so that he himself might give all his time to de- 
bauchery. Sejanus plotted to supplant his master, and the un- 
timely discovery of this conspiracy caused his downfall, a.d. 31. 

17. Hannibal (247-183 b.c). The great Carthaginian gen- 
eral. He invaded Italy in 218 b.c, and for fifteen years 
defeated every army the Romans sent against him, but was 
finally obliged to return to Africa to oppose the Roman general 
Scipio's attack on Carthage. Here he was defeated at Zama, 
which battle closed the Second Punic War. By many he is 
considered the greatest general of antiquity. 

17. Johnson's Charles. Charles XII. , king of Sweden (1697- 
1718). In 1700, when he was only eighteen years old, he was 
attacked by a coalition of Denmark, Poland, and Russia. In 
two years' time he forced Denmark to sue for peace, defeated at 
Narva the Russian army, which outnumbered his forces six to 
one, and drove Augustus, the king of Poland, from that country, 
supplanting him by a king of his own choice. Later, he invaded 
Russia, and was finally defeated by Peter the Great at Pultowa, 
1709. (Read Byron's Mazeppa.) Charles then fled to Turkey, 
where he managed to rouse the porte against Peter. The great 
czar was only saved from destruction through the bribing of 
the Turkish vizier by Catherine, afterward Peter's wife and 
empress. Charles was finally imprisoned by the Turks, but 
escaped in 1714, to find that most of his provinces south of the 
Baltic had been conquered by his enemies. Nevertheless, un- 
daunted, he attacked the Norwegian possessions of Denmark, 
but was killed by a musket ball at the siege of the little fortress 
of Friedrickshald. There was suspicion that he was assassinated. 






Page 24] NOTES 91 

The following lines are the conclusion of Johnson's description, 
beginning after the defeat of Pultowa : — 

" The vanquished hero leaves his broken hands, 
And shows his miseries in distant lands ; 
Condemned a needy suppliant to wait, 
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate. 



But did not Chance at length the errour mend? 
Did no subverted empire mark his end? 
Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound ? 
Or hostile millions press him to the ground ? 
His fall was destined to a barren strand, 
A petty fortress and a dubious hand ; 
He left the name, at which the world grew pale, 
, To point a moral, or adorn a tale." 

19. The miseries of a literary life. 

" Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, 
And pause awhile from letters to be wise ; 
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. 
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, 
To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
If dreams yet flatter, yet again attend, 
Hear Lydiat's life and Galileo's end." 

Boswell says that "patron" (in the fourth line) was orig- 
inally "garret," but that Johnson made the change after his 
experience with Lord Chesterfield. This great poem is printed 
entire in Coates's Fireside Encyclopcedia of Poetry, in Hale's 
Longer English Poems, and in Syle's From Milton to Tennyson. 

21. Demosthenes and Cicero. The greatest Athenian orator 
was Demosthenes (384 or 385-322 b.c), and the greatest Ro- 
man orator, Cicero (106-43, b.c). Neither of them has been 
equalled, though all the greatest modern orators have used them 



92 NOTES [Pages 24-27 

as models. Most schoolboys are familiar with the Orations 
against Catiline, and Demosthenes' Oration on the Crown is 
universally admitted to be the greatest speech ever delivered. 

P. 25, 1. 3. A humble stage in Goodman's Fields. A theatre 
not far from the Tower of London, built in 1729. Garrick made 
the success of the house in 1741. 

5. Drury Lane Theatre. First opened under Killegrew's 
patent in 1663, and rebuilt several times since. 

P. 26, 1. 18. The versification of " Irene." Compare the fol- 
lowing lines from Johnson's tragedy with the extracts from his 
satires given above : — 

" Arrayed in purer light, look down on me 
In pleasing visions and assuasive dreams." 

" Can brave Leontius call for airy wonders, 
Which cheats interpret, and which fools regard? " 

" Through hissing ages, a proverbial coward, 
The tale of women, and the scorn of fools." 

Read Macaulay's Addison (paragraphs 22-25) for a good de- 
scription of this sort of verse. 

19. Benefit nights. The author of a play had the profits of 
every third night. 

P. 27, 1. 1. The Tatler was a periodical published three 
times a week, begun by Richard Steele (1672-1729) in 1709. 
In this work he was joined by his friend, Joseph Addison (1672- 
1719), who aided him still more effectively in the Spectator, a 
daily literary journal of higher tone and character, continued 
through 635 numbers. Read Macaulay's Essay on Addison, 
and also Thackeray's novel Henry Esmond, for descriptions of 
these celebrated authors. 



Page 27] NOTES 93 

16. Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761). The first great Eng- 
lish novelist. He was a bookseller, who after his fiftieth year 
wrote the novels Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles 
Grandison. These are noted for their minute analysis of char- 
acter. They enjoyed great popularity in their day, but now, 
on account of their extreme length, are rarely read. 

18. Young, Edward (1684 ?-l 765). A noted writer in his 
time, but now almost forgotten. His best work is a solemn 
poem entitled Night Thoughts. 

18. Hartley, David (1705-1757). A celebrated mental phi- 
losopher of the eighteenth century. His chief work is Observa- 
tions on Man. 

20. Dodington. George Bubb Dodington, afterward Lord 
Melcombe, controlled six seats in Parliament, and consequently 
had to be reckoned with in the politics of the time. He changed 
sides several times merely to further his own interests. How- 
ever, he was a man of taste and reading and is accounted the 
last of the " patrons of literature." For some time he exercised 
a great influence over Prince Frederic, perhaps for the follow- 
ing reason. Walpole reports that the prince said to him: 
"Dodington is reckoned a clever man, and yet I have got 
£5,000 from him which he will never see again." 

24. Prince Frederic was the eldest son of George II., and 
the father of George III. He was bitterly opposed to his father, 
who returned his dislike. The king is reported to have said : 
I My dear first born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, 
and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole 
world, and I heartily wish he was out of it." Frederic's place 
in history was summed up by the following epigram current 
soon after his death : — 



94 NOTES [Pages 28-30 

" Here lies Fred 
Who was alive and is dead. . . . 
There's no more to he said." 

P. 28, 1. 21. The purity of the English tongue. "Some 
said that the hard words in the liambler were used by the 
author to render his Dictionary indispensably necessary." — 
Burney. 

P. 29, 1. 7. Sir Roger, etc. Characters or papers in the 
Spectator. 

15. Squire Bluster, etc. Characters or papers in the 
liambler. 

P. 30, 1. 2. Which she accepted with but little gratitude. 
The following, which Johnson wrote of his wife shortly after 
her death, tells another tale. He describes her as a woman 
"whom none who were capable of distinguishing either moral 
or intellectual excellence, could know without esteem or tender- 
ness. She was extensively charitable in her judgments and 
opinions, grateful for every kindness she received, and willing 
to impart assistance of every kind to all whom her little power 
enabled her to benefit. She passed through many months of 
languour, weakness, and decay, without a single murmur of im- 
patience, and often expressed her adoration of that mercy which 
granted her so long a time for recollection and penitence." — 
Johnson's Works, Vol. IX., p. 523. 

5. The Gunnings. Maria and Elizabeth, the two beautiful 
daughters of a poor Irish gentleman. When they were pre- 
sented to the lord lieutenant in Dublin, they wore dresses 
borrowed from Peg Woffington, the celebrated actress. They 
went to London in 1751 and created a great sensation. 
Crowds followed them whenever they appeared in public, and 



Pages 30-31] NOTES 95 

they were generally called " The Beauties." Maria, who mar- 
ried the Earl of Coventry, was at one time granted a guard of 
soldiers by the king to protect her from the too fervent admira- 
tion of the public. Elizabeth became first the Duchess of Ham- 
ilton, and, by a second marriage, Duchess of Argyll. When she 
was presented at court after her first marriage, the anxiety to 
see her was so great that "the noble mob in the drawing room 
clambered upon chairs and tables to look at her." Horace 
Walpole mentions the sisters frequently in his letters. 

6. Lady Mary. Daughter of the Duke of Kingston and wife 
of Mr. E. Wortley Montague. She was noted for her wit and 
for her intimacy with distinguished men of letters. Her devoted 
friendship and subsequent bitter quarrel with Alexander Pope 
gave rise to one of the most famous literary feuds of the eigh- 
teenth century. The delightful Letters which she wrote from 
Constantinople are still widely read ; and we owe to her the 
practice of inoculation which she had witnessed in Turkey. 

6. Her opinion of his writings. Boswell writes : "Johnson 
told me, with an amiable fondness, a little pleasing circum- 
stance relative to this work [the Rambler]. Mrs. Johnson, in 
whose judgment and taste he had great confidence, said to him 
after a few numbers of the Rambler had come out, ' I thought 
very well of you before ; but I did not imagine you could have 
written anything equal to this.' Distant praise from whatever 
quarter is not so delightful as that of a wife whom a man loves 
and esteems." 

8. The Monthly Review was the leading Whig periodical of 
the day, and therefore predisposed to be sharply critical of the 
outspoken Tory, Johnson. 

P. 31, 1. 8. Dictator. "And I hereby declare that I make a 



96. NOTES [Page 31 

total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English 
language as a free-born British subject, to the said Mr. John- 
son, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more, I will not 
only obey him, like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a 
modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, 
and hold him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer." 
Chesterfield's paper in the World, December 5, 1754. 

15. In a letter. The famous letter is as follows : — 
To the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield. 

February 7, 1755. 
My Lord, 

I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the World 
that two papers in which my Dictionary is recommended to the 
public, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished 
is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from 
the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to 
acknowledge. 

When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your 
Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the 
enchantment of your address ; and could not forbear to wish 
that I might boast myself le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre. 
— that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world con- 
tending ; but I found my attendance so little encouraged that 
neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. 
When I had once addressed your lordship in public, I had 
exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly 
scholar can possess. I have done all that I could ; and no man 
is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. 

Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in 
your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door ; during 
which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties 
of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last 
to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one 
word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment 
I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. 



Pages 31-32] NOTES 97 

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, 
and found him a native of the rocks. 

Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on 
a man struggling for life in the w r ater, and when he has reached 
ground encumbers him with help ? The notice which you have 
been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been 
kind ; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot 
enjoy it ; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till I am 
known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asper- 
ity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, 
or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing 
that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for 
myself. 

Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation 
to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I 
should conclude it, if less be possible, with less ; for I have 
been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once 
boasted myself with so much exultation, my Lord, 

Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, 

Sam. Johnson. 



23. Home Tooke (1736-1812). A celebrated etymologist 
and Whig political writer. In 1775 he was fined and im- 
prisoned for publishing an advertisement in which he accused 
the king's troops of barbarously murdering the Americans at 
Lexington. He was a great conversationalist, but his fame 
rests on his Diversions of Purley, a work on the etymology and 
analysis of English words. 

P. 32, 1. 1G. Scarcely a Teutonic language. English, Ger- 
man, Dutch, and the Scandinavian dialects form the Teutonic 
language group. Macaulay's statement here is overdrawn. 
More than seventy per cent of the words in Johnson's most 
pompous writings are of Teutonic origin. It may interest the 

H 



98 NOTES [Pages 32-34 

student to examine in this regard the extracts from the writings 
of Johnson given in these notes. 

17. Junius and Skinner. " For the Teutonick etymologies I 
am commonly indebted to Junius and Skinner . . . Junius 
appears to have excelled in extent of learning and Skinner in 
rectitude of understanding. . . . Skinner is often ignorant but 
never ridiculous : Junius is always full of knowledge, but his 
variety distracts the judgement, and his learning is very fre- 
quently disgraced by his absurdities." — Johnson's Works, Vol. 
V., p. 29. Francis Junius the younger was born at Heidelberg 
in 1589, and died at Windsor in 1678. His Etymologicum 
Anglicanum was not published till 1743. The Etymologicon 
Linguce AnglicancB of Stephen Skinner (1623-1667) was pub- 
lished in 1671. 

P. 33, 1. 15. Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787). A somewhat 
noted wit and minor poet. His first poem was the Art of 
Dancing. Originally a mild sceptic, he later was converted, 
and wrote one of the popular eighteenth-century works on the 
Evidences of Christianity. He is now remembered only on 
account of Johnson's review of his paper on the Origin of Evil. 
See Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 
Ch. VIL, Sees. 15-17. 

P. 34, 1. 11. " Rasselas." The original title given by John- 
son to the publisher was, The Choice of Life, or the History of 

Prince of Abyssinia. It was written in January, 1759, 

and published probably before April. There were eight 
editions in Johnson's lifetime, and it was translated into almost 
every modern language. After the sixth edition, the title was 
changed to Easselas. It is the most complete expression of 
his message to the world. (See Appendix, p. 187.) The first 



Pages 34-35] NOTES 99 

sentence, which is often quoted, is an excellent example of 
Johnson's weighty style. 

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and 
pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that 
age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies 
of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to 
the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." 

13. Miss Lydia Languish is the heroine of Sheridan's 
comedy, the Bivals, — a young beauty much given to reading 
sentimental novels and to indulging in romantic fancies. 

22. The Critical Review was the leading Tory periodical of 
the clay. 

P. 35, 1. 20. The Happy Valley was the place where, accord- 
ing to Johnson's tale., the royal children of Abyssinia were 
educated. 

21. Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727). The greatest mathe- 
matician and natural philosopher of modern times. 

24. Bruce's Travels. Macaulay implies that Johnson could 
have informed himself of the real character of the natives of 
Abyssinia. But James Bruce started on his voyage to Abyssinia 
in 1768 and returned in 1773, fourteen years after the publi- 
cation of Rasselas; his Travels were published six years after 
Johnson's death. When Johnson wrote his tale, Abyssinia 
was a sort of romantic unknown land, for Lobo's book (see 
note, p. 9, 1. 7) was hardly more than a clever fiction. At that 
time little was known of Asiatic or African peoples. Few 
Europeans had even studied their languages, and it was a com- 
mon thing for eighteenth-century writers to lay the scenes of ' 
their tales in these half-known lands, in order to be freer in 
their satire and criticism of their own countries, and to escape 
the dangers of the censorship. No attempt was made to depict 

LofC.. 



100 NOTES [Pages 35-36 

accurately the manners and customs of lands almost as un- 
known as "Lilliput" and " Brobdingnag." Johnson was but 
following the fashion of the time, and had any one suggested 
that he had described Egypt and Cairo incorrectly, he would 
have crushed the "puppy" with one of his "rhinoceros 
laughs." 

P. 36, 1. 3. Burke, Edmund (1728 P-1797). The most noted 
orator of his time as well as an essayist of great powers. His 
best essays are those on the Sublime and the Beautiful and on 
the French Bevolution. His greatest speeches are Concilia- 
tion with America and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. 
Although a fervid Whig, he and Johnson were firm friends. 
There is an interesting sketch of Burke in Macaulay's Essay on 
Warren Hastings. 

4. Mrs. Lennox, Charlotte (1720-1804). Daughter of Lieu- 
tenant-governor Kamsay of New York. At the age of fifteen 
she went to England and devoted herself to literature, writing 
novels and dramas now forgotten. She was on terms of inti- 
macy with Richardson and Johnson. Hawkins writes : "One 
evening at the club Johnson proposed to celebrate the birthday 
of Mrs. Lennox's literary child, as he called her book, by a 
whole night spent in festivity. Our supper was elegant, and 
Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple pie should 
make a part of it, and this he would have stuck with bay leaves, 
because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox was an authoress, and had 
written verses, and further he had prepared for her a crown of 
laurel, with which, but not till he had invoked the Muses by 
some ceremonies of his own invention, he enriched her brows. 
About five, Johnson's face shone with meridian splendour, though 
his drink had been only lemonade." 



Pages 3G-37] NOTES 101 

In the Dictionary Johnson cited a passage to illustrate the 
word talent from her best novel, the Female Quixote. And 
he used very few citations from contemporary writers. 

5. Mrs. Sheridan (1724-1706) was the mother of the dram- 
atist and orator Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She was also 
a novelist and dramatist of vogue. Johnson spent many 
pleasant hours in her society, she being, as Bos well says, u a 
most agreeable companion to an intellectual man." 

19. The poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, etc. See 
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. ii., and Winter's 
Tale, Act II., Sc. i., and Act V., Sc. ii. Hector was the hero of 
Troy in the legendary Trojan War, supposed to have taken 
place in the twelfth century b.c. Aristotle, one of the greatest 
of Greek philosophers, lived in the fourth century b.c. Julio 
Romano (1192-1546) was an Italian painter and Raphael's 
favorite pupil. At Delphi was the most famous oracle of 
ancient Greece. 

P. 37, 1. 8. Language so coarse, etc. " Coarse " is altogether 
too strong a word to apply to Johnson's language, which was 
noted, both in conversation and writing, for its freedom from 
all obscenity and profanity — a remarkable thing in those days. 
The definition referred to is: "Excise: A hateful tax levied 
upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of 
property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. " 

10. The Lord Privy Seal is the title of the officer who has 
the custody of the Privy Seal which is appended to British 
documents not important enough to require the Great Seal. The 
lord referred to is Lord Gower. Boswell reports that Johnson 
said to him: "You know, Sir, Lord Gower forsook the old 
Jacobite interest. When I came to the word BenegadOy after 



102 NOTES [Pages 37-38 

telling that it meant ' one who deserts to the enemy, a revolter,' 
I added, sometimes we say a Gower. Thus it went to the press : 
but the printer had more wit than I, and struck it out." 

20. The city was becoming mutinous. London has always 
been the stronghold of the opposition to the extension of the 
royal prerogatives. 

21. Cavendishes and Bentincks, etc. The Cavendishes 
(Dukes of Devonshire) and the Bentincks (Dukes of Portland) 
were prominent Whig families, closely intermarried. The 
Somersets (Dukes of Beaufort) and the Wyndhams (Earls of 
Egremont), also closely connected, were equally noted on the 
Tory side. George I. and George II. had left the government 
of England practically in the hands of the great Whig families 
to whom they owed the throne. But George III. (1760-1820) 
had been brought up by liis mother with the idea that he should 
be a real king, not a creature of Parliament ; that he should 
rule, not merely reign. His plan was to break the Whig power 
by drawing the disaffected members of that party, together with 
some of the leading Tories, into a new party which was known 
as the " King's Friends." Although George was " wretchedly 
educated, and his natural powers were of the meanest sort," 
he succeeded for a time, had his own obstinate way, and as a 
consequence lost the American Colonies. Read Macaulay's 
Essay on The Earl of Chatham, Green's History, Ch. X., Sec. 
II., and Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 

23. Lord Bute (1713-1792) was prime minister from May, 
1762, to April, 1763. His government is notorious for being one 
of the most unpopular that ever held office in England. 

P. 38, 1. 12. The printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. 
One of the duties of the youngest apprentice in the printing 



rAGES 38-39] NOTES 103 

offices is to "run after copy," and so he would naturally be a 
terror to Johnson who generally did his writing at full speed at 
the last moment. The sheriff's officers had, as we know, arrested 
Johnson several times for debt. The following extract from 
Boswell gives Johnson's reasons for practically ceasing to write : 
..." Johnson. 'No, Sir, I am not obliged to do any more. 
No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to 
have part of his life to himself. If a soldier has fought a good 
many campaigns, he is not to be blamed if he retires to ease and 
tranquillity. A physician who has practised long in a great 
city may be excused if he retires to a small town and takes 
less practice. Now, Sir, the good I can do by my conversation 
bears the same proportion to the good I can do by my writings, 
that the practice of a physician, retired to a small town, does 
to his practice in a great city.' Boswell. 'But I wonder, 
Sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing.' 
Johnson. ' Sir, you may wonder.' " 

P. 39, 1. 15. Cock Lane. The following account is from 
Hare's Walks in London, Vol. I., p. 204 seq. : — 

"Till a few years ago people frequently came to this crypt 
[of St. John's church, Clerkenwall] to visit the coffin (now 
buried) of ' Scratching Fanny the Cock Lane Ghost,' which 
had excited the utmost attention in 1762, being as Walpole 
said, not a apparition, but an audition. It was supposed 
that the spirit of a young lady poisoned by a lover to whom she 
had bequeathed her property, came to visit, invisibly, but with 
very mysterious noises, a girl named Parsons who lived in Cock 
Lane (between Smithfield and Holborn) and was daughter to 
clerk of St. Sepulchre's church. Horace Walpole went to see 
the victim, witli the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, 
Lady Mary Coke, and Lord Hertford, but after waiting till half- 
past one in the morning in a suffocating room with fifty people 



104 NOTES [Page 39 

crowded into it, he was told that the ghost would not come that 
night till seven in the morning, 'when,' says Walpole, 'there 
were only prentices and old women.' At length the ghost having 
promised by an affirmative knock, that she would attend any one 
of her visitors in the vaults of St. John's church, and there knock 
upon her coffin, an investigation was made, of which Dr. John- 
son, who was present, has left a description. . . . The failure 
of the investigation led to the discovery that the father of the 
girl who was the supposed object of spiritual visitation had 
arranged the plot in order to frighten the man accused of mur- 
der into remitting a loan which he had received from him whilst 
he was lodging in his house. Parsons was imprisoned for a 
year, and placed three times in the pillory, where, however, 
instead of maltreating him, the London mob raised a subscrip- 
tion in his favour." 

Of this incident Boswell says: " The real fact then is, that 
Johnson had a very philosophical mind and such a rational re- 
spect for testimony, as to make him submit his understanding 
to what was authentically proved, though he could not com- 
prehend why it was so. Being thus disposed he was willing 
to inquire into the truth of any relation of supernatural 
agency, a general belief which has prevailed in all nations and 
ages. But so far was he from being the dupe of implicit faith, 
that he examined the matter with a jealous attention, and no 
man was more ready to refute its falsehood when he had dis- 
covered it." And "Johnson was one of those by whom the 
imposture was discovered. The story had become so popular 
that he thought it should be investigated." 

Johnson's account of the investigation written for the Gentle- 
man'' s Magazine, closed with these words : " It is therefore the" 
opinion of the whole assembly, that the child has some art of 
making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no 



Pages 39-40] NOTES 105 

agency of any higher cause." The student should examine the 
passage in the essay carefully to see how Macaulay manages to 
imply that Johnson was duped. See Hill's Boswell, Vol. I., p. 
407, note ; the Cock Lane Ghost, by A. Lang ; and the Cock Lane 
Ghost, by Howard Pyle, in Harper's Magazine, August, 1893. 
23. Churchill, Charles (1731-1764) a popular poet and 
satirist, noted for his profligacy as well as his stinging wit. 
His Bosciad achieved an immense vogue. The following are 
some of the lines in Churchill's Ghost which are referred to by 
Macaulay, and are an excellent example of the personal satire 
of the eighteenth century. 

" Pomposo, insolent and loud, 
Vain idol of the scribbling crowd. 

Who, proudly seized of learning's throne, 
Now damns all learning but his own. 

But makes each sentence current pass 
With puppy, coxcomb, scoundrel, ass. 

Who to increase his native strength 
Draws words six syllables in length, 
With which, assisted with a frown 
By way of club, he knocks us down. 

He for subscribers baits his hook, 

And takes their cash — but where's the book ? 

No matter where — wise fear, we know, 

Forbids the robbing of a foe ; 

But what, to serve our private ends, 

Forbids the cheating of our friends?" 

P. 40, 1. 15. Polonius. See Shakespeare's Hamlet. W. Tooke 
said of Johnson's Shakespeare: "The extraordinary merit of 
the preface and critical observations atoned for the meagreness 



106 NOTES [Page 40 

of the notes." The note on Polonius, Act II., Sc. IV., is as 
follows : — 

Polonius is a man bred in courts, exercised in business, 
stored with observation, confident of his knowledge, proud of 
his eloquence, and declining into dotage. His mode of oratory 
is truly represented as designed to ridicule the practice of those 
times, of prefaces that made no introduction, and of method 
that embarrassed rather than explained. This part of his char- 
acter is accidental, the rest is natural. Such a man is positive 
and confident, because he knows that his mind was once strong, 
and knows not that it has become weak. Such a man excels in 
general principles, but fails in the particular application. He 
is knowing in retrospect, and ignorant in foresight. AVhile he 
depends upon his memory, and can draw from his repositories 
of knowledge, he utters weighty sentences, and gives useful 
counsel ; but as the mind in its enfeebled state cannot be kept 
long busy and intent, the old man is subject to sudden derelic- 
tion of his faculties, he loses the order of his ideas, and entangles 
himself in his own thoughts, till he recovers the leading prin- 
ciple, and falls again into his former train. The idea of dotage 
encroaching upon wisdom, will solve all the phenomena of the 
character of Polonius. 

17. Wilhelm Meister is Goethe's greatest prose work, — anovel 
he was years in writing, and which contains some of his ripest 
thoughts. Among these is his world-famous criticism on Hamlet, 
which is scattered through Book IV. The concluding paragraph 
from the characterization of Hamlet in Ch. XIII. will give an 
idea of the whole : — 

"A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature without the 
strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden 
which it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are 
holy for him ; the present one is too hard. Impossibilities have 
been required of him ; not in themselves impossibilities, but 



Pages 40-42] NOTES 107 

such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself ; 
he advances and recoils ; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself 
in mind, at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts, 
yet still without recovering his peace of mind." — Carlyle's 
Translation of Wilhelm Meister. 

18. It would be difficult to name, etc. The honest Johnson 
did not slur his work, though later Shakespearian commentators 
have naturally gone far beyond him. He says ( Works, Vol. V., 
p. 152): "I have indeed disappointed no opinion more than 
my own : yet I have endeavoured to perform my task with no 
slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the whole work has 
appeared to me corrupt which I have not attempted to restore ; 
or obscure which I have not attempted to illustrate." 

P. 41, 1. 12. Ben. Ben Jonson (1574 P-1637) was, next to 
Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of the Elizabethan Age. 
Every one knows his beautiful song, "Drink to me only with 
thine eyes," and his lines to the memory of Shakespeare which 
contain the often-quoted verse, — 

"He was not of an age, but for all time." 

20. ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the three 
greatest poets of the ancient Greek drama, which reached its 
perfection at Athens in the fifth century b.c. 

25. Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, Marlow, Beaumont, 
and Fletcher were English dramatists contemporary with Shake- 
speare and Johnson. Decker is usually spelled Dekker. 

P. 42, 1. 9. Doctor's degree. In 1755 the degree of M.A. was 
conferred upon Johnson by Oxford on account of the Dictionary 
which was about to appear. Trinity College, Dublin, gave him 
the degree of LL.D. in 1765. The Oxford degree of Doctor of 
Laws was granted in 1775, through the influence of the prime 



108 NOTES [Pages 42-44 

minister, Lord North, who was Chancellor of the University, as 
a reward for Johnson's political writings in support of North's 
policies. Boswell says: "It is remarkable that he never, as 
far as I knew, assumed his title of Doctor, but called himself 
Mr. Johnson." 

10. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts was founded by a 
charter of George III. in 1768. The following year Johnson 
was appointed Professor of Ancient Literature, — an honorary 
office, with no salary. 

P. 44, 1. 5. A club. Boswell writes: "Soon after his 
[Johnson's] return to London, which was in February, was 
founded that Club which existed so long without a name, but 
at Mr. Garrick's funeral became distinguished by the title of 
The Literary Club. Sir Joshua Reynolds had the merit of 
being the first proposer of it, to which Johnson acceded, and the 
original members were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Mr. 
Edmund Burke, Dr. Nugent, Mr. Beauclerk, Mr. Langton, Dr. 
Goldsmith, Mr. Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at 
the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, one evening in every 
week, at seven, and generally continued their conversation till 
a pretty late hour. The club has been gradually increased to 
its present number, thirty-five [1791]. After about ten years, 
instead of supping weekly, it was resolved to dine together once 
a fortnight during the meeting of Parliament." 

11. The trunk maker and the pastry cook. Before wrapping 
paper was made cheaply out of straw and wood pulp, the sheets 
of unsalable books were used for lining trunks and wrapping 
up confectionery. 

13. Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-1774) the most delightful 
author of his age. His poems, the Traveller and the Deserted 



Pages 44-45] NOTES 109 

Village, and his novel, the Vicar of Wakefield, are still widely- 
read ; while his comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, still holds the 
stage. Read Macaulay's Life of Goldsmith, in the Encyclopcedia 
Britannica. The Jessamy Bride, a novel by F. Frankfort Moore, 
though rather slight in workmanship, has Goldsmith as its hero, 
and contains some bright sketches of Johnson, and the leading 
members of " The Literary Club." 

15. Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-1792). The best painter of 
England in the eighteenth century, and a noted writer on art. 
His portraits are especially remarkable. He was the first presi- 
dent of the Royal Academy, and was knighted by the king on 
his appointment. 

16. Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794). His Decline and Fall of 
the Boman Empire ranks among the greatest histories ever 
written, and is certainly the best ever written in English. 

17. Jones, Sir William (1746-1794). The first great English 
Oriental scholar, and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society. 
His most famous work is his translation of the beautiful San- 
scrit drama, Sakuntala, which introduced European scholars to 
a new and wonderful world. 

24. Bennet Langton (1737-1801), though a gentleman of in- 
dependent means and a great student, published nothing, yet 
Mrs. Piozzi writes : "I remember when to have Langton at a 
man's house stamped him at once as a literary character." 
Bos well says : " Johnson was not less ready to love Mr. Langton 
for his being of a very ancient family, for I have heard him say 
with pleasure 'Langton, Sir, has a grant of free warren from 
Henry the Second ; and Cardinal Stephen Langton of King 
John's reign was of his family.' " 

P. 45, 1. 1. Topham Beauclerk (1739-1780) was the only son 



110 NOTES [Page 45 

of Lord Sidney Beauclerk, fifth son of the first Duke of St. 
Alban's, and consequently a great-grandson of Charles II. and 
Nell Gwynn. He was a great lover of literature, and at his 
death left a library of thirty thousand volumes especially rich 
in English drama and English history. Boswell says: "Mr. 
Beauclerk's being of the St. Alban's family, and having in 
some particulars a resemblance to Charles the Second, con- 
tributed in Johnson's imagination to throw a lustre upon 
his other qualities, and in a short time, the moral, pious 
Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. 
' What a coalition ! ' (said Garrick when he heard of this ; ) 
' I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Round-house.' 
But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable associa- 
tion. Beauclerk was too polite, and valued learning and 
wit too much, to offend Johnson by sallies of wit and licentious- 
ness ; and Johnson delighted in the good qualities of Beauclerk, 
and hoped to correct the evil. Innumerable were the scenes in 
which Johnson was amused by these young men. [Boswell 
gives a most entertaining account of a ' frisk ' of Johnson with 
Langton and Beauclerk, who once after midnight routed the 
grave philosopher out of his bed and took him about the town.] 
Beauclerk could take more liberty with him than anybody with 
whom I ever saw him ; but, on the other hand, Beauclerk was not 
spared by his respectable companion, when reproof was proper." 
16. James Boswell (1740-1795). Macaulay is extreme in his 
judgment of Boswell, or " Bozzy," as Johnson affectionately 
called him. In his essay on Croker's Edition of Boswell, he is 
even more severe. Carlyle, in his essay on Boswell' s Johnson, 
while admitting gross defects, does justice to Boswell's un- 
doubted merits. The student should read both essays, of which 



Page 45] 



NOTES 



111 



copious extracts are given in the Appendix. A part of the two 
views of Boswell is given here. 



" We are not sure that there 
is in the whole history of the 
human intellect so strange a 
phenomenon as this book. 
Many of the greatest men 
that ever lived have written 
biography. Boswell was one 
of the smallest men that ever 
lived, and he has beaten them 
all. He was, if we are to give 
any credit to his own account, 
or to the united testimony of 
all who knew him, a man of 
the meanest and feeblest in- 
tellect." 

" Of the talents which ordi- 
narily raise men to eminence 
as writers, Boswell had abso- 
lutely none. There is not in 
all his books a single remark 
of his own on literature, poli- 
tics, religion, or society, which 
is not either commonplace or 
absurd." 

' ' That such a man should 
have written one of the best 
books in the world is strange 
enough. But this is not all. 
Many persons who have con- 
ducted themselves foolishly in 
active life, and whose conver- 
sation has indicated no supe- 



" Boswell was a person 
whose mean or bad qualities 
lay open to the general eye ; 
visible, palpable to the dullest. 
His good qualities, again, be- 
longed not to the Time he 
lived in ; were far from com- 
mon then ; indeed, in such a 
degree, were almost unexam- 
pled ; not recognizable there- 
fore by everyone; nay, apt even 
(so strange had they grown) 
to be confounded with the very 
vices they lay contiguous to, 
and had sprung out of." 

"Thus does poor Bozzy 
stand out to us as an ill- 
assorted, glaring mixture of 
the highest and the lowest. 
What, indeed, is man's life 
generally but a kind of beast- 
godhood ; the god in us tri- 
umphing more and more over 
the beast ; striving more and 
more to subdue it under his 
feet?" 

"Nay, sometimes a strange 
enough hypothesis has been 
started of him ; as if it were 
in virtue even of these same 
bad qualities that he did his 
good work ; as if it were the 



112 



NOTES 



[Page 45 



rior powers of mind, have left 
us valuable works. Goldsmith 
was very justly described by 
one of his contemporaries as an 
inspired idot, and by another 
as a being 
' Who wrote like an angel, and 

talked like poor Poll.' 
La Fontaine was in society 
a mere simpleton. His blun- 
ders would not come in 
amiss among the stories of 
Hierocles. But these men 
attained literary eminence in 
spite of their weaknesses. 
Boswell attained it by reason 
of his weaknesses. If he had 
not been a great fool, he would 
never have been a great writer. 
Without all the qualities which 
made him the jest and the tor- 
ment of those among whom he 
lived, without the officiousness, 
the inquisitiveness, the effron- 
tery, the toad-eating, the in- 
sensibility to all reproof, he 
never could have produced so 
excellent a book. He was a 
slave proud of his servitude, a 
Paul Pry, convinced that his 
own curiosity and garrulity 
were virtues, an unsafe com- 
panion who never scrupled to 
repay the most liberal hospi- 
tality by the basest violation 
of confidence, a man without 
delicacy, without shame, with- 



very fact of his being among 
the worst men in this world 
that had enabled him to write 
one of the best books therein ! 
Falser hypothesis, we may ven- 
ture to say, never rose in 
human soul. Bad is by its 
nature negative, and can do 
nothing; whatsoever enables 
us to do anything is by its 
very nature good. Alas, that 
there should be teachers in 
Israel, or even learners, to 
whom this world-ancient fact 
is still problematical, or even 
deniable! Boswell wrote a 
good Book because he had a 
heart and an eye to discern 
Wisdom, and an utterance to 
render it forth ; because of his 
free insight, his lively talent, 
above all, of his Love and 
childlike Open-mindedness. 
His sneaking sycophancies, his 
greediness and forwardness, 
whatever was bestial and 
earthy in him, are so many 
blemishes in his Book, which 
still disturb us in its clearness: 
wholly hindrances, not helps. 
Towards Johnson, however, 
his feeling was not Sycophancy, 
which is the lowest, but Rev- 
erence, which is the highest of 
human feelings. None but a 
reverent man (which so un- 
speakably few are) could have 



Pages 45-46] 



NOTES 



113 



out sense enough to know 
when he was hurting the feel- 
ings of others, or when he was 
exposing himself to derision ; 
and because he was all this, he 
has, in an important depart- 
ment of literature, immeasur- 
ably surpassed such writers 
as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, 
and his own idol Johnson." 
— Macaulmj. 



found his way from Boswell's 
environment to Johnson's : if 
such worship for real God- 
made superiors showed itself 
also as worship for apparent 
Tailor-made superiors, even as 
hollow interested mouth-wor- 
ship for such, — the case, in 
this composite human nature 
of ours, was not miraculous, 
the more was the pity ! But 
for ourselves, let every one of 
us cling to this last article of 
Faith, and know it as the 
beginning of all knowledge 
worth the name : That neither 
James Boswell's good Book, 
nor any other good thing, in 
any time or in any place, was, 
is, or can be performed by any 
man in virtue of his badness, 
but always and solely in spite 
thereof." — Carlyle. . 



P. 46, 1. 6. Wilkes, John (1727-1797). A prominent Eng- 
lish politician of the latter half of the eighteenth century. 
" Wilkes was a worthless profligate, but he had a remarkable 
faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side, and, by a 
singular irony of fortune, he became the chief instrument in 
bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Con- 
stitution has ever made. He woke the nation to the need of 
Parliamentary reform by his defence of the rights of con- 
stituencies against the despotism of the House of Commons. 
He took the lead in the struggle which put an end to the secrecy 



114 NOTES [Page 46 

of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish the 
right of the Press to discuss public affairs." — Green's History, 
Ch. X., Sec. II. 

8. Whitfield or Whitefield, George (1714-1770). The 
founder of the sect of Calvinistic Methodists, who separated 
from the Wesleyan Methodists in 1741. " Whitefield's preaching 
was such as England had never heard before, theatrical, ex- 
travagant, often commonplace ; but hushing all criticism by its 
intense reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep, tremulous 
sympathy with the sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no 
common enthusiast who could wring gold from the close-fisted 
Franklin, and admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole ; 
or, who could look down from the top of a green knoll at Kings- 
wood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal 
pits ; and see, as he preached, the tears making white channels 
down their blackened cheeks." — Green's History, Ch. X., 
Sec. I. 

20. Johnson was a water drinker. Boswell reports : 
"Talking of drinking wine, he [Johnson] said, ' I did not leave 
off wine because I could not bear it ; I have drunk three bottles 
of port without being the worse for it. University College has 
witnessed this.' Boswell. ' Why then, Sir, did you leave it 
off ? ' Johnson. ' Why, Sir, because it is so much better for a 
man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose 
power over himself. . . . There is more happiness in being 
rational. . . . [And elsewhere] . . . Sir, I have no objection 
to a man's drinking wine if he can do it in moderation. I found 
myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been 
for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it bet- 
ter not to return to it.' " 






Pages 48-50] NOTES 115 

P. 48, 1: 2. The Thrales. Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi's Anecdotes, 
p. 125) says they first met in 1764. Mr. Thrale sought an ex- 
cuse for inviting him. Johnson dined with them every Thurs- 
day through the winter of 1764-1765, and in the autumn of 1765 
followed them to Brighton. The correspondence between John- 
son and Mrs. Thrale is published in part in Scoone's Four 
Centuries of English Letters. 

21. Southwark. A district of London south of the Thames. 
Thrale's brewery was sold by Johnson, as executor of the estate, 
to Barclay, Perkins & Co. , whose successors still carry on the 
business under the same firm name. It is one of the largest 
breweries in London. The buildings, which occupy twelve acres, 
are situated on Park Street near the famous St. Saviour's Church 
and not far from London Bridge. 

22. Streatham Common. A suburban district a few miles 
south of London. 

P. 49, 1. 20. Bath and Brighton were in the eighteenth cen- 
tury the two most fashionable watering-places in England. 
Brighton, on the south coast, is still flourishing ; but Bath, in 
Somersetshire, has lost much of its former vogue. A delightful 
account of Bath in the fulness of its glory is given in Gold- 
smith's interesting Life of Bichard Nash, commonly known as 
" Beau Nash," who was master of ceremonies there. Read 
Monsieur Beaucaire, by Booth Tarkington. 

23. Fleet Street is one of the busiest streets in the centre of 
London, and runs from Ludgate Circus to the Strand 'and then 
westward. 

P. 50, 1. 8. An old lady named Williams. Of her Johnson 
wrote : " Thirty years and more she had been my companion, 
and her death has left me very desolate." Hawkins {Life of 



116 NOTES [Pages 50-51 

Johnson, p. 558) says that "she had not only cheered him in 
his solitude, and helped him to pass with comfort those hours 
which otherwise would have been irksome to him, but had re- 
lieved him from domestic cares, regulated and watched over the 
expenses of his house." "Had she had," wrote Johnson, 
"good humor and prompt elocution, her universal curiosity 
and comprehensive knowledge would have made her the delight 
of all that knew her." — Piozzi Letters, Vol. II., p. 311. 
" When she grew peevish in her old age and last sickness, he 
was forced to bribe the maid to stay with her by a secret stipu- 
lation of half-a-crown a week over her wages." — Bos-well. 

P. 51, 1. 3. The Mitre Tavern was in Mitre Court, just off 
Fleet Street, and there Johnson and many other literary men 
were wont to gather. 

13. To torment him and live upon him. And it may be 
added, to furnish objects for his overflowing charity and affec- 
tion. Johnson once said : " If I did not assist them no one else 
would, and they must be lost from want." Mrs. Thrale writes : 
" If, however, I ventured to blame their ingratitude, and con- 
demn their conduct, he would instantly set about softening the 
one and justifying the other ; and finished commonly by telling 
me, that I knew not how to make allowances for situations I 
never experienced." She also states that he loved the poor as 
she never saw any one else love them, with an earnest desire to 
make them happy. He proposed to allow himself a hundred 
pounds a year out of the three hundred of his pension ; but she 
could never discover that he really spent upon himself more 
than seventy or at most eighty pounds. In contrast to 
Macaulay's clever but rather superficial picture, compare what 
Carlyle says on the same subject. See Appendix, pp. 179-181. 



Pages 52-53] NOTES 117 

P. 52, 1. 6. The Celtic region. That part of Scotland 
where a Celtic language, the Erse, was spoken. Celtic 
languages are still spoken also in parts of Wales, Ireland, and 
Brittany. 

Johnson made a profound impression on the natives. "He 
was long remembered amongst the lower orders of Hebrideans 
by the title of Sassenach More, the big Englishman.' 1 '' — Walter 
Scott. From the Isle of Skye Johnson wrote : " The 
hospitality of this remote region is like that of the Golden 
Age. We have found ourselves treated at every house as 
if we came to confer a benefit." — Piozzi Letters, Vol. I., 
p. 155. 

P. 53, 1. 3. Presbyterian polity and ritual. The Reformation 
in Scotland had mainly taken the Calvinistic form, owing to 
the work of the great John Knox, and the Presbyterian Church 
was established. From the accession of James I. to the throne 
of England, down to the expulsion of James II., the Stuart 
kings had constantly endeavored to force the Episcopalian 
polity upon the Scotch Calvinists. In this they were met by 
the "Covenanters," as the adherents of the Presbytery were 
called, and the struggle went on with varying fortunes till the 
Covenanters, by taking the side of William and Mary, secured 
the reestablishment of the Presbytery. At the Union of England 
and Scotland (1707) Presbyterianism was definitely recognized 
as the established religion of the northern kingdom. Read Old 
3IortaUty, by Walter Scott. 

6. Berwickshire and East Lothian are districts in the south 
of Scotland. 

8. Lord Mansfield, William Murray (1705-1793). A great 
British jurist. He became Lord Chief Justice and Baron Mans- 



118 NOTES [Pages 53-54 

field in 1756, and Earl of Mansfield in 177G. His judicial 
decisions were notoriously severe. Horace Walpole speaks of 
him as one, "who never felt pity and never relented unless 
terrified," and as one "who hated the popular party as much 
as he loved severity." 

23. Macpherson, James (1738-1796) obtained a remarkable 
notoriety by his alleged discovery of the " Poems of Ossian " in 
the Erse language. These he claimed to have translated. In 
1762 he published Fingal, an Epic Poem in Six Books, and the 
following year Temora, an Epic Poem in Eight Books. They 
created a great sensation, were translated into every modern 
European language, and gave rise to a fierce controversy. 
Critics demanded a sight of the originals, but Macpherson never 
gratified them. 

P. 54, 1. 2. Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the 
following letter : — 



Mr. James Macpherson 






" I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence 
offered me I shall do my best to repel ; and what I cannot do 
for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be 
deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces 
of a ruffian. 

"What would you have me retract? I thought your book 
an imposture ; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I 
have given my reasons to the publick, which I here dare you to 
refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, 
are not so formidable, and w T hat I hear of your morals, inclines 
me to pay regard not to what you say, but to what you shall 
prove. You may print this if you will. 

"Sam. Johnson." 



Pages 54-56] NOTES 119 

24. Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hendersons. Ob- 
scure writers who would now be entirely forgotten had they 
not attacked Johnson. 

P. 55, 1. 7. " Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." 
"0 greatest one, if you are willing, I desire to contend with 
you." 

20. Bentley, Kichard (1662-1742). England's greatest 
classical scholar. His famous Dissertation on the Epistles of 
Phalaris was the first attempt to apply the principles of his- 
torical criticism to the authenticity of ancient writings. In 
Macaulay 's Life of Francis Atterbury (Encyclopaedia Britannica) 
is a very entertaining account of the famous discussion on 
Phalaris and of Bentley's part in it. The " apothegm " in full 
is, "It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written 
out of reputation but by himself." — Monk's Life of Bentley, 
p. 90. 

P. 56, 1. 14. Taxation no Tyranny. This was intended to 
offset the effect of the great Whig orations, such as Burke's 
Conciliation with America. The pamphlet, however, was bet- 
ter than Macaulay will allow. " Johnson's sentiments towards 
his fellow subjects in America have never, so far as I know, 
been rightly stated. It was not because they fought for liberty 
that he had come to dislike them. A man who, bursting forth 
with generous indignation has said : ' The Irish are in a most 
unnatural state ; for we see the minority prevailing over the 
majority,' was not likely to wish that our plantations should be 
tyrannically governed. The man who, in company with some 
grave men at Oxford, gave as his toast, ' Here's to the next 
insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,' was not likely 
to condemn insurrection in general. The key to his feelings is 



120 NOTES [Pages 56-58 

found in his indignant cry, ' How is it that we hear the loudest 
yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes ? ' He hated slavery 
as perhaps no man of his time hated it. In 1756, he described 
Jamaica as a ' place of great wickedness, a den of tyrants, and 
a dungeon of slaves.' " — Hill's Boswell, Vol. II., Appendix B. 

18. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Butler (1751-1816). A cele- 
brated dramatist and orator. Two of his comedies, the Bivals 
and the School for Scandal, still hold the stage ; and his speech 
at the " impeachment of Warren Hastings is still remembered as 
perhaps the very grandest triumph of oratory in a time prolific 
of such triumphs." See Macaulay's Essay on Warren Hastings. 

20. Wilson, Richard (1714-1782). The first great English 
landscape painter. 

P. 58, 1. 4. Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667). Although quite 
forgotten now, Cowley's poetry was once considered equal to 
that of Spenser and Shakespeare. 

8. The Restoration. The return in 1660 of the Stuarts 
after the rule of the Long Parliament and the Cromwells. 

15. The wits of Button. "Button's" was a coffee-house 
in London frequented by Addison and his group of admirers. 
Read Macaulay's essay on Addison, and Pope's sarcastic lines 
in the Epistle to Arbuthnot. 

15. Cibber, Colley (1671-1757). A noted actor and drama- 
tist, one of the patentees of Drury Lane Theatre, and poet 
laureate in 1730. His adaptations of some of Shakespeare's 
plays still remain the "acting editions." 

17. Orrery, John Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery. He 
wrote a life of Swift. 

17. Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745). The greatest of English 
satirists, and the most original writer of his time. A clever 



Pages 58-62] NOTES 121 

versifier, but a master of straightforward prose. His Gulliver' 1 s 
Travels are immortal. There is a fine sketch of him in Ma- 
caulay's essay on Addison. 

19. Services of no very honourable kind to Pope. " Savage 
was of great use to Mr. Pope, in helping him to little stories, 
and idle tales, of many persons whose names, lives, and writ- 
ings had been long since forgot, had not Mr. Pope mentioned 
them in his Dunciad. This office was too mean for anyone 
but inconsistent Savage, who, with a great deal of absurd 
pride, could submit to servile offices ; and, for the vanity of be- 
ing thought Mr. Pope's intimate, made no scruple of frequently 
sacrificing a regard to sincerity or truth." — Cibber's Lives of 
the Poets, Vol. V., p. 266. 

P. 60, 1. 8. Dryden, John (1631-1700). The greatest poet of 
the Restoration. His satires and fables are masterpieces of 
their kind. Together with Sir William Temple, Dryden is re- 
garded as having founded modern English prose style. His 
Alexander' 's Feast and Ode on St. Cecilia's Day are still read 
with pleasure. 

0. Gray, Thomas (1716-1771) will always be remembered 
for his perfect Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, — the 
best poem of its kind in English literature. 

13. Malone, Edmond (1741-1812). A great Shakespearian 
critic and commentator. 

P. 61, 1. 3. Robertson, William (1721-1793). His History 
of Charles V. is still a standard work. 

P. 62, 1. 13. A music master from Brescia. His name was 
Piozzi, and he was really an honest, estimable man, making 
Mrs. Thrale very happy in her second marriage. Macaulay 
here merely echoes the prevailing British contempt for "fid- 



122 NOTES [Pages 02-64 

dlers" and musicians generally. See article "Piozzi" in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

P. 63, 1. 22. The Ephesian Matron. A story from Petronius 
retold in Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, last chapter. The 
11 matron" attempted to weep herself to death in the tomb of 
her departed husband, but fell in love with a soldier who was 
guarding the corpses of some robbers that were hanging near 
by. In order to save her new lover from punishment, one of 
the corpses having been stolen while they had been conversing, 
she gave him the body of her defunct husband to hang 
in its place. 

22. The two pictures. See Hamlet, Act III., Sc. IV. 

P. 64, 1. 10. The feeling described, etc. "The secret hor- 
rour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being, whose life 
is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. . . . We always 
make a secret comparison between a part and the whole ; the 
termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself 
has likewise its termination ; when we have done any thing 
for the last time, we involuntary reflect that a part of the clays 
allotted to us are past, and that as more is past, there is less 
remaining. . . . 

" I hope that my readers are already disposed to view every 
incident with seriousness, and improve it by meditation ; and 
that, when they see this series of trifles brought to a conclu- 
sion, they will consider that, by outliving the Idler, they have 
passed weeks, months, and years, which are no longer in their 
power ; that an end must in time be put to everything great as 
to everything little ; that to life must come its last hour, and to 
this system of being its last day, the hour in which probation 
ceases, and repentance will be vain ; the day in which every 
work of the hand, and imagination of the heart, shall be 
brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be de- 
termined by the past." — (From the last number of the Idler.) 



Pages 65-66] NOTES 123 

P. 65, 1. 10. Windham, William (1750-1810). An English 
statesman and orator. Macaulay in his Essay on Warren Hast- 
ings says, "There with eyes reverentially fixed on Burke, 
appeared the finest gentleman of the age, his form developed 
by every manly exercise, his face beaming with intelligence and 
spirit, the ingenuous, the chivalrous, the high-souled Windham." 
However, in spite of his great gifts, he gained the disparaging 
title of " weathercock " from the instability of his opinions. 

13. Frances Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay (1752- 
1840). Her novels Evelina and Cecilia had the greatest vogue 
in their time. They are now rarely read, but her Journal and 
Letters are known everywhere. Read Macaulay's essay on 
Madame D'Arblay. 

P. m, 1. 3. Denham, Sir John (1615-1668). A royalist poet 
of mediocre ability. 

3. Congreve, William (1672-1729). One of the leading 
dramatists of the Restoration. 

3. Gay. See note on the Beggar's Opera, p. 78. 

3. Prior, Matthew (1664-1721). A minor poet, especially 
noted for his "society verse." 



APPENDIX A 

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF JOHNSON FROM 
MACAULAY AND CARLYLE 

I. Selections from Macaukiy's Essay on Croker's 
Edition of Boswett's Life of Johnson. — Edinburgh 
Be view, 1831. 

Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his 
fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is 
better known to us than any other man in history. 
Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, 
his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling 
walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too 
clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his 
insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with 
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick 
of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious 
practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his 
morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his con- 
tortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, 
his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic 

125 



126 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestu- 
ous rage, his queer intimates, old Mr. Levett and blind 
Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all 
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have 
been surrounded from childhood. 

Johnson came up to London precisely at the time 
when the condition of a man of letters was most miser- 
able and degraded. It was a dark night 

State of between two sunny da vs. The age of pat- 
authors in J J ox 

the early ronage had passed away. The age of gen- 
eighteenth era j curiosity and intelligence had not 
arrived. The number of readers is at 
present so great that a popular author may subsist 
in comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. 
In the reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and 
of George the First, even such men as Congreve 
and Addison would scarcely have been able to live 
like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. 
But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature 
was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by 
artificial encouragement, by a vast system of bounties 
and premiums. There was, perhaps, never a time at 
which the rewards of literary merit were so splendid, 






ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 127 

at which men who could write well found such easy 
admittance into the most distinguished society, and to 
the highest honours of the state. The chiefs of both 
the great parties into which the kingdom was divided 
patronised literature with emulous munificence. Con- 
greve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was 
rewarded for his first comedy with places which made 
him independent for life. Smith, though his Hip- 
polytiis and Phcedra failed, would have been consoled 
with three hundred a year but for his own folly. 
E-owe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land- 
surveyor of the customs in the port of London, clerk 
of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary 
of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes 
was secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Am- 
brose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court in 
Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of 
the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. 
Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of 
high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced 
life as an apprentice to a silk-mercer, became a secre- 
tary of legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem 
on the Death of Charles the Second, and to the City 
and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his intro- 
duction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and 



128 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the 
unconquerable prejudice of the queen, would have 
been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his 
hand, passed through the crowd of his suitors to 
welcome Parnell, when that ingenious writer deserted 
the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps and 
a member of Parliament. Arthur Main waring was a 
commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the im- 
prest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of 
Ireland. Addison was secretary of state. 

This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as 
it seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only 
noble versifier in the court of Charles the Second who 
possessed talents for composition which were indepen- 
dent of the aid of a coronet. Montague owed his eleva- 
tion, to the favour of Dorset, and imitated through the 
whole course of his life the liberality to which he was 
himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley 
and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of 
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. 
But soon after the accession of the House of Hanover 
a change took place. The supreme power passed to a 
man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The 
importance of the House of Commons was constantly 
on the increase. The government was under the neces- 



r> 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON~] 129 

sity of bartering for Parliamentary support much of 
that patronage which had been employed in fostering 
literary merit ; and Walpole was by no means inclined 
to divert any part of the fund of corruption to pur- 
poses which he considered as idle. He had eminent 
talents for government and for debate. But he had 
paid little attention to books, and felt little respect 
for authors. One of the coarse jokes of his friend, Sir 
Charles Handbury Williams, was far more pleasing to 
him than Thomson's Seasons or Richardson's Pamela. 
He had observed that some of the distinguished writ- 
ers whom the favour of Halifax had turned into 
statesmen had been mere encumbrances to their party, 
dawdlers in office, and mutes in Parliament. During 
the whole course of his administration, therefore, he 
scarcely befriended a single man of genius. The best 
writers of the age gave all their support to the opposi- 
tion, and contributed to excite that discontent which, 
after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust 
war, overthrew the minister to make room for men 
less able and equally immoral. The opposition could 
reward its eulogists with little more than promises and 
caresses. St. James's would give nothing: Leicester 
house had nothing to give. 

Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his lit- 



130 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

erary career, a writer had little to hope from the patron- 
age of powerful individuals. The patronage of the 
Grub Street public did not yet furnish the means of com- 
authors. fortable subsistence. The prices paid by 
booksellers to authors were so low, that a man of con- 
siderable talents and unremitting industry could do 
little more than provide for the day which was passing 
over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. 
The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. 
The season of rich harvests was over, and the period 
of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable 
might now be summed up in the word Poet. That 
word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, 
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and per- 
fectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits 
of the Common Side in the King's bench prison and 
of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest 
pitied him ; and they well might pity him. For if 
their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were 
not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally 
acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to 
dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to trans- 
late ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be 
hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pes- 
tilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's 






ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 131 

Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys 
behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June 
and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to 
die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, 
was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had 
lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted 
to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, 
would have sat in Parliament, and would have been 
intrusted with embassies to the High Allies ; who, if 
he had lived in our time, would have found encourage- 
ment scarcely less munificent in Albemarle-street or in 
Paternoster-row. 

As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every 
walk of life has its peculiar temptations. The literary 
character, assuredly, has always had its 
share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid istics of the 
sensibility. To these faults were now "Poets." 
superadded the faults which are commonly found in 
men whose livelihood is precarious, and whose prin- 
ciples are exposed to the trial of severe distress. All 
the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were 
blended with those of the author. The prizes in the 
wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less 
ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune came, it 
came in such a manner that it was almost certain to 



132 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

be abused. After months of starvation and despair, 
a full third night or a well-received dedication filled 
the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet with 
guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with 
the images of which his mind had been haunted 
while he was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating 
potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week 
of taverns soon qualified him for another year of 
night-cellars. Such was the life of Savage, of Boyse, 
and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in gold- 
laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed 
because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing 
paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; some- 
times drinking Champagne and Tokay with Betty 
Careless ; sometimes standing at the window of an 
eating-house in Porridge island, to snuff up the scent 
of what they could not afford to taste ; they knew 
luxury ; they knew beggary ; but they never knew 
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked 
on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion 
which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a 
stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities 
of civilised communities. They were as untameable, 
as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild 
ass. They could no more be broken in to the offices 



ON BOS WELL'S LLFE OF JOHNSON 133 

of social man than the unicorn could be trained to 
serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did 
not, like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands 
which ministered to their necessities. To assist them 
was impossible ; and the most benevolent of mankind 
at length became weary of giving relief which was 
dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it 
had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the 
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, 
might have supplied him for six months, it was 
instantly spent in strange freaks of sensuality, and, 
before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was 
again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to 
get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous cook- 
shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their 
houses, those houses were forthwith turned into 
bagnios and taverns. All order was destroyed; all 
business was suspended. The most good-natured host 
began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of 
genius in distress, when he heard his guest roaring for 
fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning. 

A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope 
had been raised above poverty by the active patronage 
which, in his youth, both the great political parties 
had extended to his Homer. Young had received the 



134 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

only pension ever bestowed, to the best of our recollec- 
tion, by Sir Kobert Walpole, as the reward of mere 
literary merit. One or two of the many poets who 
attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in 
particular and Mallett, obtained, after much severe 
suffering, the means of subsistence from their political 
friends. Richardson, like a man of sense, kept his 
shop ; and his shop kept him, which his novels, admi- 
rable as they are, would scarcely have done. But 
nothing could be more deplorable than the state even 
of the ablest men, who at that time depended for sub- 
sistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Field- 
ing, and Thomson, were certainly four of the most 
distinguished persons that England produced during 
the eighteenth century. It is well known that they 
were all four arrested for debt. 

Into calamities and difficulties such as these John- 
son plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that 
time till he was three or four and fifty, we have little 
information respecting him ; little, we mean, compared 
with the full and accurate information which we 
possess respecting his proceedings and habits towards 
the close of his life. He emerged at length from cock- 
lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 
polished and the opulent. His fame was established. 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 135 

A pension sufficient for his wants had been conferred 
on him : and he came forth to astonish a generation 
with which he had almost as little in common as with 
Frenchmen or Spaniards. 



Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of 

a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of 

Grub Street hacks ; the last of that genera- „ 

Char act er- 

tion of authors whose abject misery and istics of 
whose dissolute manners had furnished Johnson. 
inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. 
From nature he had received an uncouth figure, a dis- 
eased constitution, and an irritable temper. The 
manner in which the earlier years of his manhood 
had been passed had given to his demeanour, and 
even to his moral character, some peculiarities 
appalling to the civilised beings who were the 
companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity 
of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of 
strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of 
sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally 
strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted 
with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity 
of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of 



136 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

those with whom he lived during the last twenty years 
of his life, a complete original. An original he was, 
undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed 
full information concerning those who shared his early 
hardships, we should probably find that what we call 
his singularities of manner were, for the most part, 
failings which he had in common with the class to 
which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he 
had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John's 
Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should 
eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed 
the morning in doubt whether he should have food 
for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had 
accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but 
not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast ; 
but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a 
famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, 
and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He 
scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he 
drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, 
in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral dis- 
ease which raged with such deadly malignity in his 
friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence 
which he showed in society were to be expected from 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 137 

a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been 
long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of 
meat, of fire, arid of clothes, by the importunity of 
creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the de- 
rision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that 
bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs 
which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that de- 
ferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through 
all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant 
had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. 
It was natural that, in the exercise of his svmr>ath\ 
power, he should be " eo immitior, quia and lack of 
toleraverat," that, though his heart was s V m P ath y- 
undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in 
society should be harsh and despotic. For severe 
distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, 
but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a 
harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no 
pity ; for it was a kind of suffering which he could 
scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his 
shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. 
He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd 
of wretched old creatures who could find no other 
asylum ; nor could all their peevishness and ingrati- 
tude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of 



138 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous ; and lie 
scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs 
of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much 
of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry 
vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody 
ought to be as much hardened to these vexations as 
himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining 
of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about 
the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. 
These were, in his phrase, " foppish lamentations," 
which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a 
world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying 
because the Good-natured Man had failed, in- 
spired him with no pity. Though his own health 
was not good, he detested and despised valetudi- 
narians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the 
loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. 
People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity 
might weep, he said, for such events, but all that could 
be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was 
not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock 
dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such 
grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and 
the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine 
small children, would not have sobbed herself to death. 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 139 

A person who troubled himself so little about small 
or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very 
attentive to the feelings of others in the Lack of 
ordinary intercourse of society. He could politeness. 
not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could 
make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor," 
said he to Goldsmith, " what harm does it do to a man 
to call him Holofernes ? " " Pooh, ma'am," he ex- 
claimed to Mrs. Carter, " who is the worse for being 
talked of uncharitably ? " Politeness has been well 
defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was 
impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but 
because small things appeared smaller to him than to 
people who had never known what it was to live for 
fourpence-half penny a day. 



The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the 
union of great powers with low prejudices. If we 
judged of him by the best parts of his Great pow- 
mind, we should place him almost as high ers and low 
as he was placed by the idolatry of Bos- prejudices. 
well; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should 
place him even below Boswell himself. Where he 
was not under the influence of some strange scruple, 



140 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

or some domineering passion, which prevented him 
from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was 
a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined 
to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No 
man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in 
argument or by exaggerated statements of fact. But 
if, while he was beating down sophisms and exposing 
false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would 
excite laughter in a well-managed nursery, came across 
him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind 
dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation 
to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been ad- 
miring its amplitude and its force were now as much 
astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as 
the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the 
Genie, whose statue had overshadowed the whole sea- 
coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with 
armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small 
prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of 
Solomon. 

Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme 

n -. } . f severity the evidence for all stories which 
Credulity J 

and were merely odd. But when they were not 

incredulity. on ]y ^ j^ m i ra culous, his severity re- 
laxed. He began to be credulous precisely at the point 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 141 

where the most credulous people begin to be sceptical. 
It is curious to observe, both in his writings and in his 
conversation, the contrast between the disdainful man- 
ner in which he rejects unauthenticated anecdotes, 
even when they are consistent with the general laws 
of nature, and the respectful manner in which he men- 
tions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. 
A man who told him of a waterspout or a meteoric 
stone generally had the lie direct given him for his 
pains. A man who told him of a prediction or a dream 
wonderfully accomplished was sure of a courteous 
hearing. "Johnson," observed Hogarth, "like King 
David, says in his haste that all men are liars." " His 
incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale, "amounted almost to 
disease." She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, 
who gave him an account of a hurricane in the West 
Indies, and a poor quaker who related some strange 
circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege 
of Gibraltar. " It is not so. It cannot be true. Don't 
tell that story again. You cannot think how poor a 
figure you make in telling it." He once said, half 
jestingly, we suppose, that for six months he refused 
to credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that 
he still believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly 
exaggerated. Yet he related with a grave face how old 



142 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

Mr. Cave of St. John's gate saw a ghost, and how this 
ghost was something of a shadowy being. He went 
himself on a ghost hunt to Cock Lane, and was angry 
with John Wesley for not following up another scent 
of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. 
He rejects the Celtic genealogies and poems without 
the least hesitation ; yet he declares himself willing to 
believe the stories of second-sight. If he had examined 
the claims of the Highland seers with half the severity 
with which he sifted the evidence for the genuineness 
of Fingal, he would, we suspect, have come away from 
Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his Lives of 
the Poets, we find that he is unwilling to give credit to 
the accounts of Lord Roscommon's early proficiency in 
his studies ; but he tells with great solemnity an absurd 
romance about some intelligence preternaturally im- 
pressed on the mind of that nobleman. He avows him- 
self to be in great doubt about the truth of the story, 
and ends by warning his readers not wholly to slight 
such impressions. 



Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are 
worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could 
discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all 



ON BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 143 

bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples 
of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really 
obtained an insight into the divine philoso- Religious 
phy of the New Testament, and who id ^ as - 
considered Christianity as a noble scheme of govern- 
ment, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate 
the moral nature of man. The horror which the sec- 
taries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, 
mince-pies, and dancing bears, excited his contempt. 
To the arguments urged by some very worthy people 
against showy dress, he replied with admirable sense 
and spirit, "Let us not be found, when our Master 
calls us, stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the 
spirit of contention from our souls and tongues. Alas ! 
sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat 
will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." 
Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as un- 
reasonable as those of Hudibras or Ealpho, and carried 
his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities 
to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with 
Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his 
diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee 
on Good Friday. In Scotland, he thought it his duty 
to pass several months without joining in public wor- 
ship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not 



144 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating 
the piety of his neighbours was somewhat singular. 
"Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man. I 
am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for 
many years; but he never passes a church without 
pulling off his hat : this shows he has good principles.''' 
Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious rob- 
bers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could 
easily see that a Roundhead who named all his chil- 
dren after Solomon's singers, and talked in the House 
of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an 
unprincipled villain, whose religious mummeries only 
aggravated his guilt. But a man who took off his hat 
when he passed a church episcopally consecrated must 
be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. 
Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked 
on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful, deemed most 
ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of 
revelation. But with what a storm of invective he 
would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed 
him for celebrating the redemption of mankind with 
sugarless tea and butterless buns. 

Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of 
patriotism. Nobody saw more clearly the error of 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 145 

those who regarded liberty, not as a means, but as an 
end, and who proposed to themselves, as the object 
of their pursuit, the prosperity of the state political 
as distinct from the prosperity of the ideas. 
individuals who compose the state. His calm and 
settled opinion seems to have been, that forms of 
government have little or no influence on the happiness 
of society. This opinion, erroneous as it is, ought at 
least to have preserved him from all intemperance on 
political questions. It did not, however, preserve him 
from the lowest, fiercest, and most absurd extrava- 
gances of party-spirit, from rants which, in everything 
but the diction, resembled those of Squire Western. 
He was, as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the 
side of his intellect, he was a mere Pococurante, far 
too apathetic about public affairs, far too sceptical as 
to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity. 
His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to 
slaying, against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. 
The well-known lines which he inserted in Gold- 
smith's Traveller express what seems to have been his 
deliberate judgment : — 

" How small of all that human hearts endure 
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!" 

He had previously put expressions very similar into 



146 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

the mouth of Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these 
passages with the torrents of raving abuse which he 
poured forth against the Long Parliament and the 
American Congress. In one of the conversations 
reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays itself 
in the most ludicrous manner. 

The judgments which Johnson passed on books 
were, in his own time, regarded with superstitious 
Literanj veneration, and, in our time, are generally 
Judgments, treated with indiscriminate contempt. They 
are the judgments of a strong but enslaved under- 
standing. The mind of the critic was hedged round 
by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and super- 
stitions. Within his narrow limits, he displayed a 
vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled 
him to clear the barrier that confined him. 

Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, 
not like a legislator. He never examined foundations 
where a point was already ruled. His whole code of 
criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he 
sometimes quoted a precedent or an authority, but 
rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from 
the nature of things. He took it for granted that the 
kind of poetry which nourished in his own time, which 
he had been accustomed to hear praised from his child- 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 147 

hood, and which he had himself written with success, 
was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical 
work he has repeatedly laid it down as an undeniable 
proposition that during the latter part of the seven- 
teenth century, and the earlier part of the eighteenth, 
English poetry had been in a constant progress of im- 
provement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had 
been, according to him, the great reformers. He 
judged of all works of the imagination by the standard 
established among his own contemporaries. Though 
he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than 
Virgil, he seems to have thought the uEneid a greater 
poem than the Iliad. Indeed he well might have 
thought so ; for he preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's. 
He pronounced that, after Hoole's translation of Tasso, 
Fairfax's would hardly be reprinted. He could see no 
merit in our fine old English ballads, and always 
spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy's 
fondness for them. Of the great original works of 
imagination which appeared during his time, Richard- 
son's novels alone excited his admiration. He could 
see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gfulliver's 
Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle 
of Indolence, he vouchsafed only a line of cold com- 
mendation, of commendation much colder than what 



148 SELECTIONS FROM MAC AUL AY'S ESSAY 

he has bestowed on the Creation of that portentous 
bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his dia- 
lect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The 
contempt which he felt for the trash of Macpherson 
was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, just by- 
chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason 
which led many men of genius to admire it. He de- 
spised it, not because it was essentially commonplace, 
but because it had a superficial air of originality. 

He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of composi- 
tions fashioned on his own principles. But when a 
deeper philosophy was required, when he undertook 
to pronounce judgment on the works of those great 
minds which "yield homage only to eternal laws," 
his failure was ignominious. He criticised Pope's 
Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on Shake- 
speare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the 
most part as wretched as if they had been written by 
Bymer himself, whom we take to have been the worst 
critic that ever lived. 



On men and manners, at least on the men and man- 
ners of a particular place and a particular age, Johnson 
had certainly looked with a most observant and dis- 



ON BOSWELL?S LIFE OF JOHNSON 149 

criminating eye. His remarks on the education of 
children, on marriage, on the economy of families, on 
the rules of society, are always striking, and Social 
generally sound. In his writings, indeed, judgments. 
the knowledge of life which he possessed in an eminent 
degree is very imperfectly exhibited. Like those un- 
fortunate chiefs of the middle ages who were suffo- 
cated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold, his 
maxims perish under that load of words which was 
designed for their defence and their ornament. But 
it is clear from the remains of his conversation, that 
he had more of that homely wisdom which nothing 
but experience and observation can give than any 
writer since the time of Swift. If he had been con- 
tent to write as he talked, he might have left books on 
the practical art of living superior to the Directions to 
Servants. 



Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears 
far greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His 
conversation appears to have been quite Johnson's 
equal to his writings in matter, and far st y le - 
superior to them in manner. When he talked, he 
clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural 



150 SELECTIONS FROM MAC AUL AY'S ESSAY 

expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand 
to write for the public, his style became systematically 
vicious. All his books are written in a learned lan- 
guage, in a language which nobody hears from his 
mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody 
ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a 
language in which nobody ever thinks. It is clear 
that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in 
which he wrote. The expressions which came first to 
his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. 
When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences 
out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the 
Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work 
of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the transla- 
tion; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. 
" When we were taken upstairs," says he in one of his 
letters, " a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on 
which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded 
in the Journey as follows : " Out of one of the beds on 
which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a 
man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes- 
Johnson translated aloud. " The Rehearsal" he said 
very unjustly, " has not wit enough to keep it sweet ; " 
then, after a pause, " it has not vitality enough to pre- 
serve it from putrefaction." 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 151 

Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even 
agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. 
Few readers, for example, would be willing 
to part with the mannerism of Milton or 
of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy 
on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, 
and which can be sustained only by constant effort, 
is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of 
Johnson. 

The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar 
to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, 
that it is almost superfluous to point them out. It is 
well known that he made less use than any other emi- 
nent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon 
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost 
depths of our language ; and that he felt a vicious par- 
tiality for terms which, long after our own speech had 
been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, 
and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, 
must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank 
with the king's English. His constant practice of 
padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it 
became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite', his anti- 
thetical forms of expression, constantly employed even 
where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, 



152 SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inver- 
sions, so widely different from those graceful and easy 
inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to 
the expression of our great old writers, all these pecu- 
liarities have been imitated by his admirers and paro- 
died by his assailants, till the public has become sick 
of the subject. 

Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, 
" If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, 
you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No 
man surely ever had so little talent for personation as 
Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a dis- 
appointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a 
crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the 
same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like 
Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed 
Examples hi m under every disguise. Euphelia and 
of his style. Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, 
or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia de- 
scribes her reception at the country-house of her rela- 
tions, in such terms as these : " I was surprised, after 
the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of 
the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always 
promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, 
a confused wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 153 

of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and 
every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla in- 
forms us, that she " had not passed the earlier part of 
life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of 
triumph ; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst 
the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, 
had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the 
great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her 
regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the 
gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir 
John Falstaif himself did not wear his petticoats with 
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with 
honest Sir Hugh Evans, " I like not when a 'oinan has 
a great peard : I spy a great peard under her muffler." 



APPENDIX A 

II Selections from Carlyle's Essay on BosivelVs Life of 
Johnson. — Fraser^s Magazine, 1832. 

[This is in a way an answer to Macaulay's Essay.] 

The great man does, in good truth, belong to his own 
age ; nay, more so than any other man ; being properly 
the synopsis and epitome of such age with its interests 
and influences : but belongs likewise to all ages, other- 
wise he is not great. What was transitory in him 
passes away ; and an immortal part remains, the 
significance of which is in strict speech inexhaustible, 
— as that of every real object is. Aloft, conspicuous, 
on his enduring basis, he stands there, serene, unalter- 
ing ; silently addresses to every new generation a new 
lesson and monition. Well is his Life worth writing, 
worth interpreting ; and ever, in the new dialect of 
new times, of re-writing and re-interpreting. 

Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnson: not 
ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet 
distinctly admitted into that sacred band ; whose ex- 
istence was no idle Dream, but a Reality which he 

154 



BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 155 

transacted awake ; nowise a Clotheshorse and Patent 
Digester, but a genuine Man. By nature he was 
gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that of Priest- 
hood, and Guidance of mankind; by destiny, more- 
over, he was appointed to this task, and did actually, 
according to strength, fulfil the same : so that always 
the question, How ; in ivhat spirit ; under ivhat shape ? 
remains for us to be asked and answered concerning 
him. 



The Contradiction which yawns wide enough in 
every Life, which it is the meaning and task of Life 
to reconcile, was in Johnson's wider than Johnson's 
in most. Seldom, for any man, has the contradic- 
contrast between the ethereal heavenward tlom ' 
side of things, and the dark sordid earthward, been 
more glaring : whether we look at Nature's work with 
him or Fortune's, from first to last, heterogeneity, as 
of sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands manifest. 
Whereby indeed, only this was declared, That much 
Life had been given him ; many things to triumph 
over, a great work to do. Happily also he did it; 
better than the most. 

Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost 



156 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

poetic soul ; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, un- 
sightly body : he that could never rest had not limbs 
that would move with him, but only roll and waddle : 
the inward eye, all-penetrating, all-embracing, must 
look through bodily windows that were dim, half- 
blinded; he so loved men, and 'never once saw the 
human face divine ' ! Not less did he prize the love 
of men ; he was eminently social ; the approbation of 
his fellows was dear to him, 'valuable,' as he owned, 
' if from the meanest of human beings : ' yet the first 
impression he produced on every man was to be one 
of aversion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was 
farther ordered that the imperious Johnson should be 
born poor : the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, 
generous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, 
was to be housed then in such a dwelling-place: of 
Disfigurement, Disease, and lastly of a Poverty which 
itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was 
the born king likewise a born slave : the divine spirit 
of Music must awake imprisoned amid dull-croaking 
universal Discords ; the Ariel finds himself encased in 
the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, 
we know (and thou, Keader, knowest and feelest 
even now), with all men : yet with the fewest men in 
any such degree as with Johnson. 



ON BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 157 

In fact, if we look seriously into the condition of 
Authorship at that period, we shall find that Johnson 
had undertaken one of the ruggedest of all „ A , 
possible enterprises ; that here as elsewhere ship " in 
Fortune had given him unspeakable Con- Johnson's 
tradictions to reconcile. For a man of 
Johnson's stamp, the Problem was twofold : First, not 
only as the? jiiumble but indispensable condition of all 
else, to keep himself, if so might be, alive; but secondly, 
to keep himself alive by speaking forth the Truth that 
was in him, and speaking it truly, that is, in the 
clearest and fittest utterance the Heavens had enabled 
him to give it, let the Earth say to this what she liked. 
Of which twofold Problem if it be hard to solve either 
member separately, how incalculably more so to solve 
it, when both are conjoined, and work with endless 
complication into one another ! He that finds himself 
already kept alive can sometimes (unhappily not always) 
speak a little truth ; he that finds himself able and 
willing, to all lengths, to speak lies, may, by watching 
how the wind sits, scrape together a livelihood, some- 
times of great splendor : he, again, who finds himself 
provided with neither endowment, has but a ticklish 
game to play, and shall have praise if he win it. Let 
us look a little at both faces of the matter; and see 



158 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

what front they then offered our Adventurer, what 
front he offered them. 

At the time of Johnson's appearance on the field, 
Literature, in many senses, was in a transitional state ; 
Patron and chiefly in this sense, as respects the pecuni- 
bookseller. arv subsistence of its cultivators. It was in 
the very act of passing from the protection of Patrons 
into that of the Public ; no longer to supply its neces- 
sities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, but by 
judicious Bargains with the Booksellers. This happy 
change has been much sung and celebrated ; many 
a 'lord of the lion heart and eagle eye' looking 
back with scorn enough on the bygone system of De- 
pendency : so that now it were perhaps well to con- 
sider, for a moment, what good might also be in it, 
what gratitude we owe it. That a good was in it, 
admits not of doubt. Whatsoever has existed has had 
its value : without some truth and worth lying in it, 
the thing could not have hung together, and been the 
organ and sustenance, and method of action, for men 
that reasoned and were alive. Translate a Falsehood 
which is wholly false into Practice, the result comes 
out zero ; there is no fruit or issue to be derived from 
it. That in an age when a Nobleman was still noble, 
still with his wealth the protector of worthy and 



ON BOSWELlJS LIFE OF JOHNSON 159 

humane things, and still venerated as such, a poor 
Man of Genius, his brother in nobleness, should, with 
unfeigned reverence, address him and say : " I have 
found Wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it abroad ; 
wilt thou, of thy abundance, afford me the means ? " 
— in all this there was no baseness ; it was wholly an 
honest proposal, which a free man might make, and a 
free man listen to. So might a Tasso, with a Geru- 
salemme in his hand or in his head, speak to a Duke of 
Ferrara ; so might a Shakspeare to his Southampton ; 
and Continental Artists generally to their rich Pro- 
tectors, — in some countries, down almost to these 
days. It was only when the reverence became feigned 
that baseness entered into the transaction on both 
sides ; and, indeed, nourished there with rapid luxuri- 
ance, till that became disgraceful for a Dryden, which 
a Shakspeare could once practise without offence. 

Neither, it is very true, was the new way of Book- 
seller Msecenasship worthless ; which opened itself at 
this juncture, for the most important of all transport- 
trades, now when the old way had become too miry 
and impassable. Remark, moreover, how this second 
sort of Maecenas ship, after carrying us through nearly 
a century of Literary Time, appears now to have well- 
nigh discharged its function also ; and to be working 



160 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

pretty rapidly toward some third method, the exact 
conditions of which are yet nowise visible. Thus all 
things have their end ; and we should part with them 
all, not in anger, but in peace. The Bookseller-System, 
during its peculiar century, the whole of the eighteenth, 
did carry us handsomely along, and many good Works 
it has left us ; and many good Men it maintained : if 
it is now expiring by Puffery, as the Patronage-Sys- 
tem did by Flattery (for Lying is ever the forerunner 
of Death, nay is itself Death), let us not forget its 
benefits; how it nursed Literature through boyhood 
and school-years, as Patronage had wrapped it in soft 
swaddling-bands ; — till now we see it about to put on 
the toga virilis, could it but find any such ! 

There is tolerable traveling on the beaten road, run 
how it may ; only on the new road not yet leveled and 
paved, and on the old road all broken into ruts and 
quagmires, is the traveling bad or impracticable. The 
difficulty lies always in the transition from one method 
to another. In which state it was that Johnson now 
found Literature ; and out of which, let us also say, 
he manfully carried it. What remarkable mortal first 
paid copyright in England we have not ascertained ; 
perhaps, for almost a century before, some scarce visi- 
ble or ponderable pittance of wages had occasionally 



ON BOSWELlJS LIFE OF JOHNSON 161 

been yielded by the Seller of Books to the Writer of 
them : the original Covenant, stipulating to produce 
Paradise Lost on the one hand, and Five Pounds Ster- 
ling on the other, still lies (we have been told) in 
black-on- white, for inspection and purchase by the curi- 
ous, at a Bookshop in Chancery-Lane. Thus had the 
matter gone on, in a mixed confused way, for some 
threescore years ; — as ever, in such things, the old sys- 
tem overlaps the new, by some generation or two, and 
only dies quite out when the new has got a complete 
organization and weather-worthy surface of its own. 
Among the first Authors, the very first of any signifi- 
cance, who lived by the day's wages of his craft, and 
composedly faced the world on that basis, was Samuel 
Johnson. 

At the time of Johnson's appearance there were still 
two ways on which an Author might attempt proceed- 
ing : there were the Maecenases proper in the West 
End of London; and the Maecenases virtual of St. 
John's Gate and Paternoster Row. To a considerate 
man it might seem uncertain which method were 
preferable: neither had very high attractions; the 
Patron's aid was now wellnigh necessarily polluted by 
sycophancy, before it could come to hand ; the Book- 
seller's was deformed with greedy stupidity, not to say 



162 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

entire . wooden-headedness and disgust (so that an 
Osborne even required to be knocked down, by an 
author of spirit), and could barely keep the thread of 
life together. The one was the wages of suffering and 
poverty ; the other, unless you gave strict heed to it, 
the wages of sin. In time, Johnson had opportunity 
of looking into both methods, and ascertaining what 
they were ; but found, at first trial, that the former 
would in nowise do for him. 



Little less contradictory was that other branch of the 
twofold Problem now set before Johnson : the speaking 
Johnson forth of Truth. Nay, taken by itself, it 

and " Truth." h a d i n those days become so complex as 
to puzzle strongest heads, with nothing else imposed 
on them for solution; and even to turn high heads 
of that sort into mere hollow vizards, speaking 
neither truth nor falsehood, nor anything but what 
the Prompter and Player (vTroKpiTrjs) put into them. 
Alas! for poor Johnson Contradiction abounded; in 
spirituals and in temporals, within and without. 
Born with the strongest unconquerable love of just 
Insight, he must begin to live and learn in a scene 
where Prejudice flourishes with rank luxuriance. Eng- 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 163 

land was all confused enough, sightless and yet rest- 
less, take it where you would; but figure the best 
intellect in England nursed up to manhood in the idol- 
cavern of a poor Tradesman's house, in the cathedral 
city of Lichfield ! 



Ifc was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson; 
Unity existed nowhere, in its Heaven, or in its Earth. 
Society, through every fibre, was rent asunder : all 
things, it was then becoming visible, but could not 
then be understood, were moving onwards, with an 
impulse received ages before, yet now first with a 
decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic gulf, 
where, whether in the shape of French Revolutions, 
Reform Bills, or what shape soever, bloody or blood- 
less, the descent and engulfment assume, we now see 
them weltering and boiling. Already Cant, as once be- 
fore hinted, had begun to play its wonderful part, for 
the hour was come : two ghastly Apparitions, unreal 
simulacra both, Hypocrisy and Atheism, are already, 
in silence, parting the world. Opinion and Action, 
which should live together as wedded pair, ' one flesh,' 
more properly as Soul and Body, have commenced their 
open quarrel, and are suing for a separate maintenance, 



164 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

— as if they could exist separately. To the earnest 
mind, in any position, firm footing and a life of Truth 
was becoming daily more difficult : in Johnson's position 
it was more difficult than in almost any other. 

If, as for a devout nature was inevitable ar,d in- 
dispensable, he looked up to Religion, as to the pole- 
star of his voyage, already there was no 
,e igion. j^ xe ^ polestar any longer visible ; but two 
stars, a whole constellation of stars, each proclaim ing 
itself as the true. There was the red portentous 
comet-star of Infidelity ; the dim fixed-star, burning 
ever dimmer, uncertain now whether not an atmos- 
pheric meteor, of Orthodoxy: which of these to 
choose ? The keener intellects of Europe had, almost 
without exception, ranged themselves under the 
former: for some half century, it had been the 
general effort of European speculation to proclaim 
that Destruction of Falsehood was the only Truth ; 
daily had Denial waxed stronger and stronger, Belief 
sunk more and more into decay. From our Boling- 
brokes and Tolands the sceptical fever had passed into 
France, into Scotland ; and already it smouldered, far 
and wide, secretly eating out the heart of England. 
Bayle had played his part; Voltaire, on a wider 
theatre, was playing his, — Johnson's senior by some 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 165 

fifteen years: Hume and Johnson were children 
almost of the same year. To this keener order of 
intellects did Johnson's indisputably belong : was he 
to join them ; was he to oppose them ? A compli- 
cated question : for, alas, the Church itself is no longer, 
even to him, wholly of true adamant, but of adamant 
and baked mud conjoined : the zealously Devout has 
to find his Church tottering ; and paused amazed to 
see, instead of inspired Priest, many a swine-feeding 
Trulliber ministering at her altar. It is not the least 
curious of the incoherences which Johnson had to 
reconcile, that, though by nature contemptuous and 
incredulous, he was, at that time of day, to find his 
safety and glory in defending, with his whole might, 
the traditions of the elders. 



Not less perplexingly intricate, and on both sides 
hollow or questionable, was the aspect of Politics. 
Whigs struggling blindly forward, Tories 
holding blindly back ; each with some fore- 
cast of a half truth ; neither with any forecast of the 
whole ! Admire here this other Contradiction in the 
life of Johnson ; that, though the most ungovernable, 
and in practice the most independent of men, he must 



166 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

be a Jacobite and worshiper of the Divine Eight. In 
politics also there are Irreconcilables enough for him. 
As, indeed, how could it be otherwise? For when 
Religion is torn asunder, and the very heart of man's 
existence set against itself, then in all subordinate depart- 
ments there must needs be hollowness, incoherence. 



Such was that same ' twofold Problem ' set before 
Samuel Johnson. Consider all these moral difficul- 
Johnson's ties ; and add to them the fearful aggrava- 
problem. tion, which lay in that other circumstance, 
that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must 
continually produce a certain impression and con- 
viction on the Public ; that, if he did not, he ceased 
to have ' provision for the day that was passing ovex 
him/ he could not any longer live ! How a vulgar 
character, once launched into this wild element; 
driven onwards by Fear and Famine ; without other 
aim than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in 
any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping 
quite clear of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to say, 
minding needfully both 'person' and ' character,' — 
would have floated hither and thither in it ; and con- 
trived to eat some three repasts daily, and wear some 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 167 

three suits yearly, and then to depart and disappear, 
having consumed his last ration: all this might be 
worth knowing, but were in itself a trivial knowledge. 
How a noble man, resolute for the Truth, to whom 
Shams and Lies were once for all an abomination, was 
to act in it : here lay the mystery. By what methods, 
by what gifts of eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel 
Johnson, now when cast forth into that waste Chaos 
of Authorship, maddest of things, a mingled Phlege- 
thon and Fleetditch, with its floating lumber, and sea- 
krakens, and mud-spectres, — shape himself a voj^age ; 
of the transient driftwood, and the enduring iron, 
build him a sea-worthy Life-boat, and sail therein, 
undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring ' mother 
of dead dogs,' onwards to an eternal Landmark, and 
City that hath foundations ? This high question is 
even the one answered in Boswell's Book ; which Book 
we therefore, not so falsely, have named a Heroic 
Poem; for in it there lies the whole argument of such. 
Glory to our brave Samuel ! He accomplished this 
wonderful Problem ; and now through long genera- 
tions we point to him, and say : l Here also was a 
Man; let the world once more have assurance of 
a Man!' 

Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that 



168 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

confusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, 
no light but an earthly outward one, he too must 
Johnson's have made shipwreck. With his diseased 
"light." body, and vehement voracious heart, how 
easy for him to become a carpe-diem Philosopher, 
like the rest, and live and die as miserably as any 
Boyce of that Brotherhood ! But happily there was 
a higher light for him ; shining as a lamp to his 
path ; which, in all paths, would teach him to act and 
walk not as a fool, but as wise, and in those evil days 
too, i redeeming the time.' Under dimmer or clearer 
manifestations, a Truth had been revealed to him : 
' I also am a Man ; even in this unutterable element 
of Authorship, I may live as beseems a Man ! ' That 
Wrong is not only different from Right, but that it 
is in strict scientific terms infinitely different ; even as 
the gaining of the whole world set against the losing 
of one's own soul, or (as Johnson had it) a Heaven set 
against a Hell ; that in all situations out of the Pit of 
Tophet, wherein a living Man has stood or can stand, 
there is actually a Prize of quite infinite value placed 
within his reach, namely a Duty for him to do : this 
highest Gospel, which forms the basis and worth of 
all other Gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to 
Samuel Johnson ; and the man had believed it, and 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 169 

laid it faithfully to heart. Such knowledge of the 
transcendental, immeasurable character of Duty we call 
the basis of all Gospels, the essence of all Keligion : 
he who with his whole soul knows not this, as yet 
knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing. 

This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those 
that knew : under a certain authentic Symbol it stood 
forever present to his eyes : a Symbol, in- Johnson's 
deed, waxing old as doth a garment ; yet religion. 
which had guided forward, as their Banner and celes- 
tial Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and wit- 
nesses, the fathers of our modern world ; and for him 
also had still a sacred significance. It does not 
appear that at any time Johnson was what we call 
irreligious : but in his sorrows and isolation, when 
hope died away, and only a long vista of suffering 
and toil lay before him to the end, then first did 
Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clear- 
ness ; even as the stars do in black night, which in 
the daytime and dusk were hidden by inferior lights. 
How a true man, in the midst of errors and uncer- 
tainties, shall work out for himself a sure Life-truth : 
and, adjusting the transient to the eternal, amid the 
fragments of ruined Temples build up with toil and 
pain a little Altar for himself, and worship there ; how 



170 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire, can purify 
and fortify his soul, and hold real communion with 
the Highest, ' in the Church of St. Clement Danes : I 
this too stands all unfolded in his Biography, and is 
among the most touching and memorable things there I 
a thing to be looked at with pity, admiration, awe. 
Johnson's Eeligion was as the light of life to him; 
without it his heart was all sick, dark, and had no 
guidance left. 



He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that un- 
speakable shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors ; but 
can feel hereby that he fights under a 
and attain- celestial flag, and will quit him like a 
ments. man# Tn e first grand requisite, an assured 

heart, he therefore has : what his outward equipments 
and accoutrements are, is the next question; an im- 
portant though inferior one. His intellectual stock, 
intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable; the 
furnishings of an English School and English Uni- 
versity ; good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more 
uncertain one of Greek : this is a rather slender stock 
of Education wherewith to front the world. But then 
it is to be remembered that his world Avas England ; 



ON BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON 111 

that such was the culture England commonly supplied 
and expected. Besides, Johnson has been a voracious 
reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest in strange, 
scholastic, too obsolete Libraries ; he has also rubbed 
shoulders with the press of Actual Life for some thirty 
years now : views or hallucinations of innumerable 
things are weltering to and fro in him. Above all, be 
his weapons what they may, he has an arm that can 
wield them. Nature has given him her choicest gift, 
— an open eye and heart. He will look on the world, 
wheresoever he can catch a glimpse of it, with eager 
curiosity : to the last, we find this a striking charac- 
teristic of him ; for all human interests he has a sense ; 
the meanest handicraftsman could interest him, even 
in extreme age, by speaking of his craft : the ways of 
men are all interesting to him ; any human thing that 
he did not know, he wished to know. Reflection, more- 
over, Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, 
with or without his will : for the mind of the man 
was earnest, deep as well as humane. Thus would 
the world, such fragments of it as he could survey, 
form itself, or continually tend to form itself, into a 
coherent Whole ; on any and on all phases of which, 
his vote and voice must be well worth listening to. 
As a speaker of the Word, he will speak real words ; 



172 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

no idle jargon or hollow triviality will issue from him. 
His aim too is clear, attainable ; that of working for 
his wages : let him do this honestly, and all else will 
follow of its own accord. 



Poverty, Distress, and as yet Obscnrity, are his 
companions : so poor is he that his Wife must leave 
him, and seek shelter among other relations ; John- 
son's household has accommodations for one inmate 
only. To all his ever-varying, ever-recurring troubles, 
moreover, must be added this continual one of ill- 
health and its concomitant depressiveness : a galling 
Poverty load, which would have crushed most 
and common mortals into desperation, is his 

)scun y. appointed ballast and life-burden ; he 
'could not remember the day he had passed free 
from pain.' Nevertheless, Life, as we said before, is 
always Life : a healthy soul, imprison it as you will, 
in squalid garrets, shabby coat, bodily sickness, or 
whatever else, will assert its heaven-granted indefeasi- 
ble Freedom, its right to conquer difficulties, to do 
work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does not whine 
over his existence, but manfully makes the most and 
best of it. ' He said, a man might live in a garret 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 173 

at eighteenpence a-week: few people would inquire 
where he lodged ; and if they did, it was easy to say, 
" Sir, I am to be found at such a place." By spending 
threepence in a coffee-house, he might be for some 
hours every day in very good company ; he might 
dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread-and-milk for a 
penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt day he 
went abroad and paid visits.' Think by whom and of 
whom this was uttered, and ask then, Whether there 
is more pathos in it than in a whole circulating-library 
of Giaours and Harolds, or less pathos ? 



Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson's case, whether 
a light or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting one. 
He is animated by the spirit of a true Success 
ivorkman, resolute to do his work well; and fame. 
and he does his work well; all his work, that of 
• writing, that of living. A man of this stamp is un- 
happily not so common in the literary or in any other 
department of the world, that he can continue always 
unnoticed. By slow degrees, Johnson emerges ; loom- 
ing, at first, huge and dim in the eye of an observant 
few ; at last disclosed, in his real proportions, to the 
eye of the whole world, and encircled with a ' light- 



174 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

nimbus' of glory, so that whoso is not blind must and 
shall behold him. By slow degrees, we said ; for this 
also is notable ; slow but sure : as his fame waxes 
not by exaggerated clamor of what he seems to be, but 
by better and better insight of what he is, so it will 
last and stand wearing, being genuine. Thus indeed 
is it always, or nearly always, with true fame. The 
heavenly Luminary rises amid vapors ; stargazers 
enough must scan it with critical telescopes ; it makes 
no blazing, the world can either look at it, or forbear 
looking at it; not till after a time and times does its 
celestial eternal nature become indubitable. Pleasant, 
on the other hand, is the blazing of a Tarbarrel ; the 
crowd dance merrily round it, with loud huzzaing, uni- 
versal three-times-three, and, like Homer's peasants, 
' bless the useful light : ' but unhappily it so soon ends 
in darkness, foul choking smoke ; and is kicked into 
the gutters, a nameless imbroglio of charred staves, 
pitch-cinders, and vomissement du citable ! 



If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and did 
never cease to visit him too roughly, yet the last section 
of his Life might be pronounced victorious, and on the 
whole happy. He was not idle; but now no longer 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 175 

goaded-on by want; the light which had shone 
irradiating the dark haunts of Poverty, now illu- 
minates the circles of Wealth, of a certain culture 
and elegant intelligence ; he who had once been 
admitted to speak with Edmund Cave and Tobacco 
Browne, now admits a Keynolds and a Burke to 
speak with him. Loving friends are there ; Lis- 
teners, even Answerers : the fruit of his long labors 
lies round him in fair legible Writings, of Phi- 
losophy, Eloquence, Morality, Philology ; some ex- 
cellent, all worthy and genuine Works ; for which 
too, a deep, earnest murmur of thanks reaches him 
from all ends of his Fatherland. Nay, there are 
works of Goodness, of undying Mercy, which even he 
has possessed the power to do : 'What I gave I have ; 
what I spent I had!' Early friends had long sunk 
into the grave ; yet in his soul they ever lived, fresh 
and clear, with soft pious breathings towards them, not 
without a still hope of one day meeting them again in 
purer union. Such was Johnson's Life : the victorious 
Battle of a free, true Man. Finally he died the death 
of the free and true : a dark cloud of Death, solemn and 
not untinged with halos of immortal Hope, ' took him 
away,' and our eyes could no longer behold him ; but 
can still behold the trace and impress of his courageous 



176 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

honest spirit, deep-legible in the World's Business, 
wheresoever he walked and was. 



To estimate the quantity of Work that Johnson 
performed, how much poorer the World were had 
Works and it wanted him, can, as in all such cases, 
li f e - never be accurately done; cannot, till 

after some longer space, be approximately done. All 
work is as seed sown ; it grows and spreads, and sows 
itself anew, and so, in endless palingenesia, lives and 
works. To Johnson's Writings, good and solid and 
still profitable as they are, we have already rated his 
Life and Conversation as superior. By the one and 
by the other, who shall compute what effects have 
been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, pro- 
ducing? 

If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly was 

that Johnson realized such a Life for himself and 

others ; what quality of character the main phenomena 

of his Life may be most naturally deduced from, and 

his other qualities most naturally subordi- 

Val0r - ± A i. ■ Li * 1 • 1 

nated to, in our conception ot him, perhaps 
the answer were : The quality of Courage, of Valor ; 
that Johnson was a Brave Man. . . . 






ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 177 

Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of 
Letters, was one of such ; and, in good truth, ' the 
bravest of the brave.' What mortal could have more 
to war with ? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered 
not ; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, 
prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have 
a man's heart may find that, since the time of John 
Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom 
than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he 
never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so ; 
the more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Gol- 
gotha Death-dance or Sorcerer' s-Sabbath of ' Literary 
Life in London,' appals this pilgrim ; he works resolutely 
for deliverance; in still defiance steps stoutly along. 
The thing that is given him to do, he can make himself 
do ; what is to be endured, he can endure in silence. 



Closely connected with this quality of Valor, partly 
as springing from it, partly as protected by it, are the 
more recognizable qualities of Truthfulness in word 
and thought, and Honesty in action. There is a reci- 
procity of influence here: for as the realizing of 
Truthfulness and Honesty is the lifelight and great 
aim of Valor, so without Valor they cannot, in 



178 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

anywise, be realized. Now, in spite of all practical 
short-comings, no one that sees into the signifi- 
Truthful- cance of Johnson will say that his prime 
ness. object was not Truth. In conversation 

doubtless you may observe him, on occasion, fighting 
as if for victory; — and must pardon these ebulliences 
of a careless hour, which were not without tempta- 
tion and provocation. Remark likewise two things : 
that such prize-arguings were ever on merely super- 
ficial debatable questions ; and then that they were 
argued generally by the fair laws of battle and logic- 
fence, by one cunning in that same. If their purpose 
was excusable, their effect was harmless, perhaps bene- 
ficial : that of taming noisy mediocrity, and showing it 
another side of a debatable matter : to see both sides 
of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it. 
In his Writings themselves are errors enough, crabbed 
prepossessions enough; yet these also of a quite extra- 
neous and accidental nature, nowhere a wilful shutting 
of the eyes to the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere 
a heartfelt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if 
we consider through what confused conflicting lights 
and hallucinations it had to be attained, of the highest 
everlasting Truth, and beginning of all Truths : this 
namely, that man is ever, and even in the age of Wilkes 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 179 

and Whitefield, a Bevelation of God to man; and lives, 
moves, and has his being, in Truth only ; is either true, 
or, in strict speech, is not at all ? 

Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson's love 
of Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as 
what we have named Honesty of action. < Clear your 
mind of Cant ; ' clear it, throw Cant utterly away : such 
was his emphatic, repeated precept; and did not he 
himself faithfully conform to it? The Life of this 
man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and exam- 
ined with microscopes by friend and foe ; yet was 
there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings 
are not sJiows but performances : you may weigh them 
in the balance, and they will stand weight. Not a 
line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than 
it pretends to be. Alas ! and he wrote not out of 
inward inspiration, but to earn his wages: and with 
that grand perennial tide of ' popular delusion ' flow- 
ing by ; in whose waters he nevertheless refused to 
fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy 
for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of 
Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, the 
lowest possible view of his business, which he fol- 
lowed with such nobleness. Motive for writing he 
had none, as he often said, but money ; and yet he 



180 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

wrote so. Into the region of Poetic Art he indeed 
never rose ; there was no ideal without him, avowing 
itself in his work : the nobler was that un avowed ideal 
which lay within him, and commanded, saying, Work 
out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist ! They 
who talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy 
that they too are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the 
Celestials, — let them consider well what manner of 
man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired day- 
laborer. A laborer that was worthy of his hire ; that 
has labored not as an eye-servant, but as one found 
faithful ! 



That Mercy can dwell only with Valor, is an old 
sentiment or proposition ; which in Johnson again re- 
Mercy and ceives confirmation. Few men on record 
charity. have had a more merciful, tenderly affec- 
tionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear ; 
and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one ; being 
forced to it in his own defence : yet within that shaggy 
exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, 
soft as a little child's. Nay, generally his very roar- 
ing was but the anger of affection : the rage of a Bear, 
if you will; but of a Bear bereaved of her whelps. 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 181 

Touch his Religion, glance at the Church of England, 
or the Divine Right ; and he was upon you ! These 
things were his Symbols of all that was good and 
precious for men ; his very Ark of the Covenant : 
whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of 
hearts. Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love 
to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel, fiercely 
contradictory : this is an important distinction ; never 
to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational 
outrages. But observe also with what humanity, what 
openness of love, he can attach himself to all things : 
to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a cat 
' Hodge.' ' His thoughts in the latter part of his life 
were frequently employed on his deceased friends ; he 
often muttered these or suchlike sentences : " Poor 
man ! and then he died." ' How he patiently converts 
his poor home into a Lazaretto ; endures, for long years, 
the contradiction of the miserable and unreasonable ; 
with him unconnected, save that they had no other to 
yield them refuge ! Generous old man ! Worldly pos- 
session he had little ; yet of this he gives freely ; 
from his own hard-earned shilling, the half-pence for 
the poor, that < waited his coining out,' are not with- 
held : the poor ' waited the coming out ' of one not 
quite so poor ! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on 



182 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

Dead Asses : Johnson has a rough voice ; but he finds 
the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the 
streets ; carries her home on his own shoulders, and 
like a good Samaritan gives help to the help-needing, , 
worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in 
that sense, to cover a multitude of sins ? No Peimy-a- 
week Committee-Lady, no manager of Soup-Kitchens, 
dancer at Charity-Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged 
man : but where, in all England, could there have been 
found another soul so full of Pity, a hand so heaven- 
like bounteous as his ? The widow's mite, we know, 
was greater than all the other gifts. 

Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, 
throughout manifested, that principally attracts us 
towards Johnson. A true brother of men is he ; and 
filial lover of the Earth ; who, with little bright spots 
of Attachment, ' where lives and works some loved 
one,' has beautified l this rough solitary Earth into a 
peopled garden.' Lichfield, with its mostly dull and 
limited inhabitants, is, to the last, one of the sunny 
islets for him : Salve, magna parens ! Or read those 
Letters on his Mother's death : what a genuine 
solemn grief and pity lies recorded there; a looking 
back into the Past, unspeakably mournful, unspeak- 
ably tender. 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 183 

That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affection- 
ateness, the inmost essence of his being, must have 
looked forth, in one form or another, 

P OlltGTiGSS 

through Johnson's whole character, prac- 
tical and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be 
doubted. Yet through what singular distortions and 
superstitions, moping melancholies, blind habits, whims 
about ' entering with the right foot,' and ' touching 
every post as he walked along ; ' and all the other mad 
chaotic lumber of a brain that, with sun-clear intellect, 
hovered forever on the verge of insanity, — must that 
same injmost essence have looked forth ; unrecogniz- 
able to all but the most observant! Accordingly it 
was not recognized; Johnson passed not for a fine 
nature, but for a dull, almost brutal one. Might not, 
for example, the first-fruit of such a Lovingness, 
coupled with his quick Insight, have been expected to 
be a peculiarly courteous demeanor as man among 
men? In Johnson's ' Politeness,' which he often, to 
the wonder of some, asserted to be great, there was 
indeed somewhat that needed explanation. Neverthe- 
less, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors to 
their carriage ; though with the certainty of collecting 
a mob of gazers in Fleet Street, — as might well be, 
the beau having on, by way of court-dress, 'his rusty 



184 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, 
a little shriveled wig sticking on the top of his head, 
and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his 
breeches hanging loose : ' — in all this we can see the 
spirit of true Politeness, only shining through a strange 
medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, 
there were unfortunately no chairs. 'A gentleman 
who frequently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, 
constantly found him at his desk, sitting on one with 
three legs ; and on rising from it, he remarked that 
Johnson never forgot its defect; but would either 
hold it in his hand, or place it with great composure 
against some support; taking no notice of its imper- 
fection to his visitor,' — who meanwhile, we suppose, 
sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. 'It was 
remarkable in Johnson,' continues Miss Eeynolds 
(Benny dear), 'that no external circumstances ever 
prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even 
sensible of their existence. Whether this was the 
effect of philosophic pride, or of some partial notion 
of his respecting high-breeding, is doubtful.' That it 
was, for one thing, the effect of genuine Politeness, is 
nowise doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean 
Politeness, which would surfer crucifixion rather than 
ask twice for soup : but the noble universal Politeness 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 185 

of a man that knows the dignity of men, and feels his 
own ; such as may be seen in the patriarchal bearing 
of an Indian Sachem ; such as Johnson himself ex- 
hibited, when a sudden chance brought him into dia- 
logue with his King. To us, with our view of the 
man, it nowise appears strange that he should have 
boasted himself cunning in the laws of Politeness; 
nor, ' stranger still,' habitually attentive to practise 
them. 



More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart 
to be traced in his intellectual character. What, in- 
deed, is the beginning of intellect, the first 
inducement to the exercise thereof, but 
attraction towards somewhat, affection for it? Thus 
too who ever saw or will see any true talent, not to 
speak of genius, the foundation of which is not good- 
ness, love ? From Johnson's strength of Affection, 
we deduce many of his intellectual peculiarities ; espe- 
cially that threatening array of perversions, known 
under the name of ( Johnson's Prejudices.' Looking 
well into the root from which these sprang, we have 
long ceased to view them with hostility, can pardon 
and reverently pity them. Consider with what force 



186 SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY 

early-imbibed opinions must have clung to a soul of 
this Affection. Those evil-famed Prejudices of his, 
that Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the 
Scotch, belief in Witches, and suchlike, what were 
they but the ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well- 
meaning provincial Englishmen in that day ? First 
gathered by his Father's hearth, round the kind 
'country fires' of native Staffordshire, they grew 
with his growth and strengthened with his strength; 
they were hallowed by fondest sacred recollections; 
to part with them was parting with his heart's blood. 
If the man who has no strength of. Affection, strength 
of Belief, have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank 
Heaven for it, but to himself take small thanks. 

Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson 
could not work himself loose from these adhesions ; 
that he could only purify them, and wear them with 
some nobleness. Yet let us understand how they 
grew out from the very centre of his being: nay, 
moreover, how they came to cohere in him with what 
formed the business and worth of his Life, the sum of 
his whole Spiritual Endeavor^ For it is on the same 
ground that he became throughout an Edifier and Re- 
pairer, not, as the others of his make were, a Puller- 
down ; that in an age of universal Scepticism, England 



ON BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 187 

was still to produce its Believer. Mark too his candor 
even here ; while a Dr. Adams, with placid surprise, 
asks, " Have we not evidence enough of the soul's im- 
mortality ? " Johnson answers, " I wish for more." 

But the truth is, in Prejudice ; as in all things, 
Johnson was the product of England; one of those 
1 good yeomen whose limbs were made in England : ' 
alas, the last of such Invincibles, their day being now 
done ! His culture is wholly English ; that not of a 
Thinker but of a ' Scholar : ' his interests are wholly 
English ; he sees and knows nothing but England ; he 
is the John Bull of Spiritual Europe : let him live, 
love him, as he was and could not but be ! 



APPENDIX B 

JOHNSON AS A MORALIST 

Extracts from Leslie Stephen's History of English 
Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Chapter 
XII 

Johnson escaped from the hell of Swift's passion by 
virtue of that pathetic tenderness of nature which 
lay beneath his rugged outside. If Swift excites a 
strange mixture of repulsion and pity, no one can 
know Johnson without loving him. And what was 
Johnson's special message to the world? He has 
given it most completely in Easselas. ... A disciple 
of Johnson learns the futility of enquiring into the 
ultimate purposes of the Creator; but he would 
acquiesce in the accepted creed. It is as good as any 
other, considered as a philosophy, and much better 
considered as supplying motives for the conduct of 
life. Johnson's fame amongst his contemporaries was 

188 



JOHNSON AS A MORALIST 189 

that of a great moralist; and the name represents 
what was most significant in his teaching. 

He was as good a moralist as a man can be who 
regards thfi ultimate foundations of morality as placed 
beyond the reach of speculation. " We know we are 
free, and there's an end on't," is his answer to the 
great metaphysical difficulty. He " refutes " Berkeley 
by kicking a stone. He thinks that Hume is a mere 
trifler, who has taken to " milking the bull " by way 
of variety. He laughs effectually at Soaine Jenyns's 
explanation of the origin of evil ; but leaves the 
question as practically insoluble, without troubling 
himself as to why it is insoluble, or what consequences 
may follow from its insolubility. Speculation, in 
short, though he passed for a philosopher, was simply 
abhorrent to him. He passes by on the other side, 
and leaves such puzzles for triflers. He has made up 
his mind once for all that religion is wanted, and that 
the best. plan is to accept the established creed. And 
thus we have the apparent paradox that, whilst no 
man sets a higher value upon truthfulness in all the 
ordinary affairs of life than Johnson, no man could 
care less for the foundations of speculative truth. 
His gaze was not directed to that side. Judging in 
all cases rather by intuition than by logical processes, 



190 JOHNSON AS A MORALIST 

he takes for granted the religious theories which fall 
in sufficiently with his moral convictions. To all 
speculation which may tend to loosen the fixity of 
the social order he is deaf or contemptuously averse. 
The old insidious Deism seems to him to be mere 
trash ; and he would cure the openly aggressive Deism 
of Rousseau by sending its author to the plantations. 
Indifference to speculation generates a hearty con- 
tempt for all theories. He has too firm a grasp of 
facts to care for the dreams of fanciful Utopians ; his 
emotions are too massive and rigid to be easily excited 
by enthusiasts. He ridicules the prevailing cry against 
corruption. The world is bad enough, in all con- 
science, but it will do no good to exaggerate or to 
whine. He has no sympathy with believers in the 
speedy advent of a millennium. The evils under which 
creation groans have their causes in a region far beyond 
the powers of constitution-mongers and political agi- 
tators. 

" How small of all that human hearts endure 
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure ! " 

These words sum up his political theory. Subordina- 
tion is the first necessity of man, whether in politics 
or religion. To what particular form of creed or con- 



JOHNSON- AS A MORALIST 191 

stitution men are to submit is a matter of secondary 
importance. No mere shifting of the superficial ar- 
rangements of society will seriously affect the condi- 
tion of mankind. Starvation, poverty, and disease 
are evils beyond the reach of a Wilkes or a Rousseau. 
Stick to the facts, and laugh at fine phrases. Clear 
your mind of cant. Work and don't whine. Hold 
fast by established order, and resist anarchy as you 
would resist the devil. That is the pith of Johnson's 
answer to the vague declamations symptomatic of the 
growing unrest of European society. All such queru- 
lous complaints were classed by him with the fancies 
of a fine lady who has broken her china, or a fop who 
has spoilt his fine clothes by a slip in the kennel. He 
underestimated the significance of the symptoms, 
because he never appreciated the true meaning of 
Hume or Voltaire. But the stubborn adherence of 
Johnson, and such men as Johnson, to solid fact, and 
their unreasonable contempt for philosophy, goes far 
to explain how it came to pass that England avoided 
the catastrophe of a revolution. The morality is not 
the highest, because it implies an almost wilful blind- 
ness to the significance of the contemporary thought, 
but appropriate to the time, for it expresses the 
resolute determination of the dogged English mind 



192 JOHNSON AS A MORALIST 

not to loosen its grasp on solid fact in pursuit of 
dreams ; and thoroughly masculine, for it expresses 
the determination to see the world as it is, and to 
reject with equal decision the optimism of shallow 
speculation, and the morbid pessimism of such misan- 
thropists as Swift. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Absolving felons and setting 

aside wills, 73. 
Addison, 92. 
jEschylus, 107. 
Alamode beef, 78. 
A music master from Brescia, 

121. 
An old lady named Williams, 

115. 
Aristotle, 101. 
As poor as himself, 75. 
A suitor who might have been 

her son, 76. 
At either university , 72. 
Ate like a cormorant, 89. 
Attic poetry and eloquence, 70. 
Augustan, 70. 

Bachelor of Arts, 73. 
Bath, 115. 
Beaumont, 107. 
Beggar's Opera, the, 78. 
Ben, 107. 

Benefit nights, 92. 
Bennet Langton, 109. 
Bentincks, 102. 



Bentley, 119. 

Berwickshire, 117. 

Blefuscu, 80. 

Blues of the Roman circus 

against the Greens, the, 81. 
Boswell, James, 110. 
Boyse, 86. 
Brighton, 115. 
Bruce's Travels, 99. 
Burke, 100. 
Bute, Lord, 102. 

Cambridge, 72. 
Campbells, 119. 
Capulets and Montagues, 81. 
Cavendishes, 102. 
Celtic region, the, 117. 
Charles II., 83. 
Chesterfield, Earl of, 88. 
Christ Church College, 72. 
Churchill, 105. 
Churchman, 69. 
Cibber, 120. 
Cicero, 91. 

City was becoming mutinous, 
The, 102. 



193 



194 



INDEX 



Clarendon, 84. 

Club, a, 108. 

Cock Lane, 103. 

Congreve, 123. 

Covent Garden, 88. 

Cowley, 120. 

Critical Review, the, 99. 

David Garrick, 77. 
Decker, 107. 
Delphi, 101. 
Demosthenes, 91. 
Denham, 123. 
Dictator, 95. 
Dissenters, etc., 84. 
Doctor's degree, 107. 
Dodington, 93. 
Drury Lane, 78. 
Drury Lane Theatre, 92. 
Dry den, 121. 

East Lothian, 117. 
Ephesian Matron, the, 122. 
Euripides, 107. 
Excise, the, 84. 

Falkland, 83. 
Fielding, 78. 
Fingal, 118. 
Fleet Street, 115. 
Fletcher, 107. 
Ford, 107. 
Frances Burney, 123. 



Garrick, 77. 

Gay, 78, 123. 

Gentleman commoner, 72. 

Gentleman's Magazine, the, 80. 

George the Third's policy, 102. 

Gibhon, 109. 

Goldsmith, 108. 

Grammar schools, 75. 

Gray, 121. 

Great Rebellion, the, 84. 

Great restorers of learning, the, 

71. 
Grub Street, 88. 
Gunnings, the, 94. 

Hampden, 83. 
Hannibal, 90. 
Happy Valley, the, 99. 
Hardwicke, Lord, 81. 
Harleian Library, 80. 
Hartley, 93. 
Hector, 101. 
Hendersons, 119. 
Her hand was applied in vain, 70. 
Her opinion of his writings, 95. 
Hickrad, 81. 
Hoole, 86. 
Horace, 85. 
Home Tooke, 97. 
Humble stage in Goodman's 
Fields, a, 92. 

In a letter, 96. 



INDEX 



195 



Indexmakers, 86. 
Inhospitable door, 89. 
Irene, 77. 

It ivoulcl be difficult to name, etc., 
107. 

Jacobite, 69. 

James II. , 83. 

Jenyns, 98. 

Johnson as " ringleader," 73. 

Johnson reiterated the charge of 

forgery, 118. 
Johnson's abilities and acquire- 
ments, 73. 

Charles, 90. 

ferocity, 79. 

homage to Chesterfield, 88. 

humour, 74. 

kindness and consideration, 79. 

letter to Lord Chesterfield, 96. 

letter to Macpherson, 118. 

"Literary Club," 108. 

London, 85. 

marriage (according to Car- 
lyle),76. 

prospectus to his Dictionary, 
89. 

reasons for not writing, 103. 

religion, 74. 

tribute to his wife, 94. 
Johnson was a water drinker, 

114. 
Jones, 109. 



Julio Romano, 101. 
Junius and Skinner, 98. 
Juvenal, 85. 

Kenricks, 119. 

Lady Mary, 95. 

Language so coarse, 101. 

Latin book about Abyssinia, a, 75. 

Laud, 83. 

Lennox, Mrs., 100. 

Lepels, 75. 

Lichfield, 69. 

Lord Privy Seal, the, 101. 

MacNicols, 119. 

Macpherson, 118. 

Macrobius, 72. 

Malone, 121. 

Mangled with the shears, 84. 

Mansfield, Lord, 117. 

Mario w, 107. 

Massinger, 107. 

Maxime, si tu vis, cupio con- 
tendere tecum, 119. 

Mildendo, 80. 

Miseries of a literary life, the, 91. 

Miss Lydia Languish, 99. 

Mitre Tavern, the, 116. 

Monthly Review, the, 95. 

Mrs. Johnson's fortune, 76. 

Mrs. Johnson's personal appear- 
ance, 77. 



196 



INDEX 



Nardac, 80. 
Newton, 99. 

Orrery, 120. 
Osborne, 79. 
Oxford, 72. 

Pamphleteers, 86. 

Pembroke College, 72. 

Petrarch's works, 71. 

Poet who made Hector quote 

Aristotle, the, 101. 
Politian, 75. 
Polonius, 105. 
Pomposo, 105 
Pope, 73. 
Porter's knot, 78. 
Pretty creature, 77. 
Prince Frederic, 93. 
Printer's devil or the sheriff's 

officer, the, 102. 
Prior, 123. 
Presbyterian polity and ritual, 

117. 
Psalmanazar, George, 87. 
Public Schools of England, 71. 
Pulteney, William, 81. 
Purity of the English tongue, 

the, 94. 

Queensberrys, 75. 
Rasselas, 98. 



Restoration, the, 120. 
Reynolds, 109. 
Richardson, 93. 
Robertson, 121. 
Roundheads, 84. 
Royal Academy, the, 108. 
Royal touch, the, 70. 
Rude even to ferocity , 79. 

Sacheverell, 81. 

Savage, Richard, 87. 

Scarcely a Teutonic language, 

97. 
Secretary of state, 77. 
Sejanus, 90. 
Senate of Lilliput, 80. 
Services of no very honourable 

kind to Pope, 121. 
Sheridan, 120. 
Sheridan, Mrs., 101. 
Ship money, 83. 
Sir Roger, etc., 94. 
Skinner, 98. 
Societies where he was treated 

with courtesy and kindness, 

79. 
Somersets, 102. 
Sophocles, 107. 
Southwark, 115. 
Sovereigns in possession, 69. 
Spwigs, 80. 

Squire Bluster, etc., 94. 
Staffordshire, 69. 



INDEX 



197 



Steele, 92. 

Streatham Common, 115. 
Subterranean ordinaries, 78. 
Swift, 120. 

Tatler, the, 92. 

Taxation no Tyranny, 119. 

The attempt failed, 85. 

The feeling described, etc., 122. 

Thomson, 77. 

Thrales, the, 115. 

Titty, his, 75. 

Torn Tempest, 82. 

Too dim to cheer him, 74. 

Topham Beauclerk, 109. 

To torment him and to live upon 

him, 116. 
Trunk maker and the pastry 

cook, the, 108. 
Two pictures, the, 122. 

Usher of a grammar school, 75. 



Versification of Irene, the, 92. 
Virgilian, 73. 

Warburton, 88. 

Webster, 107. 

Which she accepted with but 
little gratitude, 94. 

Whig policy in eighteenth cen- 
tury. Dissenters, etc., 84. 

Whitfield, 114. 

Wilhelm Meister, 106. 

Wilkes, 113. 

Williams, Mrs., 115. 

Wilson, 120. 

Windham, 123. 

Wits of Button, the, 120. 

Wolsey, 89. 

Worcestershire, 69. 

Wyndhams, 102. 

Young, 93. 



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